The Market for Luxury Goods: Income versus Culture.

The question of the superiority of one criterion over another has already generated a voluminous literature in marketing research. After thoroughly reviewing the social class versus income issue, Schardnger[3] concluded that, for certain products (e.g. food, coffee), social class was clearly superior to income, while the reverse was true for others (e.g. appliances, soft drinks). Rich and Jain[4] and, more recently, O'Brien and Ford[5] have established that, given certain conditions, lifestyle is more appropriate than social class. Kahle[6] has demonstrated that geography performs better than regional culture for a variety of products but Novak and MacEvoy[7] have recently shown that certain lifestyles systems are better than others. The purpose of this article is to compare the predictive power of income versus culture in the context of a market which has received relatively little attention so far: the market for luxury goods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]