Scale development & validation for assessing attitude towards counterfeit luxury

Abstract

Luxury consumption has long been the area of study both for academic as well as managerial reasons. The sector operates and thrives on what are recognized as anti-laws of marketing. However, with growing consumer aspirations as well as emergence of highly symbolic and globally recognized luxury brands, an equally thriving market is the parallel counterfeit luxury brand market. The current study looked at a significant and widely accepted driver of counterfeit luxury brand consumption- consumer attitudes towards counterfeit consumption.

A tri-component model to measure consumer attitude and purchase intention for counterfeit luxury brands was adopted basis a mixed method methodology. A 33 item five- point Likert scale was formulated and pilot tested on a sample of 188 urban consumers of counterfeit luxury brands and later validated through a study of 392 consumers’ across two Indian metros. A comprehensive 15 item scale measuring cognitive, affective and connative attitudinal components towards counterfeit luxury brands was formulated and validated. CFA was conducted to measure the goodness of fit of the proposed model. The instrument had satisfactory construct validity and high reliability scores. The study makes a unique contribution towards measuring and evaluating consumer attitude towards counterfeit luxury brands. Thus, the findings have significant theoretical and managerial implications not only for the Indian but also for other developing markets as well.