Luxury as a Sustainable Service: A Push–Pull–Mooring Perspective

Abstract

With the rapidly changing global landscape on sustainability, the luxury industry is now embracing circularity in consumption. Similarly, consumers are also evolving and changing the way they consume luxury by shifting from ownership-based models to access-based models. To uncover the underlying notions of sustainability in luxury, this conceptual article proposes the luxury as a sustainable service (LaSS) framework. It analyses consumers’ adoption of access-based, second-hand and co-ownership-based luxury models that are sustainable in their core. The study also attempts to advance the push–pull–mooring (PPM) theory by grounding the LaSS framework that further substantiates why consumers shift (or not) towards sustainable luxury. We identify push factors (voluntary conscious lifestyle, social norms, emotions of gratitude), pull factors (pro-environment behaviour, mindful consumption, warm glow) and mooring factors (materialism, social status, hedonic values, sunk cost) that play a key role in the transition of consumers towards adoption of LaSS. The LaSS framework has immense scope of being empirically tested and deeply fathom the fast-changing luxury consumer behaviour in a nuanced manner. Luxury practitioners can refer to the LaSS framework to formulate better strategies for consumers who are ready to adopt a sustainable luxury consumption regime.