The impact of demographic and psychological characteristics and cost behaviors on views towards the luxury restaurant

Article history: Received: February 1, 2016 Received in revised format: April 16, 2017 Accepted: May 23, 2017 Available online: May 23, 2017 This study examines the impact of psychological characteristics, materialism, unity, uniqueness, hedonism, and perfectionism, and demographic characteristics including gender, age and income as well as the costing behavior (price) on the views towards the luxury restaurant. The results show that perfectionism and uniqueness had a direct impact on the consumer's views towards luxury restaurant. On the other hand, the demographic characteristics such as age, income and education had a positive relationship with the consumer's views towards the luxury restaurant. Finally, a new hypothesis as the relationship between price and service quality and customer attitudes was examined in this study and it was concluded that there was a significant positive relationship between price and customer’s views. The results of the research data also confirmed the relationship between price and service quality. © 2017 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.


Introduction
Luxury-orientation and the growth of the social phenomenon of luxury costs prevalence is associated with significant growth in luxury spending.Frank (1999) believes that this trend is due to the growth of the high-income groups and increasing the incomes of low-income and middle-income groups (Twitchell, 2002).Not only the luxury goods market, but also the luxury restaurant also benefit from this fever of luxury-orientation.Because it appears that nowadays restaurant industry is facing the increasing growth (National Restaurant Association, 2007).Ketchen et al. (2006), using a statistical model holds that consumer's spending growth in the luxury restaurant can be attributed to the more wealthy clients who are willing to spend more in such restaurants.However both types of restaurants provide the variety of experiences of dinner (Francese, 2002;Twitchell, 2012).From these results it can be assumed customer increasing rate have affected the sales of stylish restaurant which Offer all the possible services.However, although researchers are witnessing the growth of luxury goods consumption expenditure but few studies have been conducted specifically on luxury restaurant (Ketchen et al., 2006;Kozup et al., 2003).The proposed model of this article helps the luxury restaurant officers understand psychological and spending characteristics of the customers of luxury restaurants.Different customers have various needs that must be met in the context of the experience of these restaurant.We also raised this question on whether the demographic characteristics affect the attitudes toward luxury restaurant or not.The present study will be useful to understand which demographic characteristics more than the others reflect the views towards the luxury restaurant.In general, the questions posed in this study are as follows: 1) whether incentives represent the customers' willingness to the luxury restaurant?2) Do demographic characteristics affect the consumer's attitude towards a luxury restaurant? 3) Is the cost information (price) impact on the consumer's attitude towards luxury goods?

The definition of luxury restaurants
The present study used a market-based definition of the luxury restaurants which is: buying and selling the luxury goods is lower, buying it requires very high level of willingness and awareness and to a large degree dependent on our self-image.Vickers and Renand (2003) in their exploratory study on the definition of luxury believe that luxury can be determined based on three major aspects: functionalism, empirical symbolism and symbolic interaction (Vigneron & Johnson, 1999).There are few studies that provide a clear definition of luxury products or goods.Although it is beneficial for academic researchers, managers of restaurants and consumers of such restaurants to have a definition that everyone agrees on.Previous research defines luxury restaurant as "a restaurant that offers complete dinner services, has a high quality environment and a menu that most of its items are over than $ 2" (Vickers & Re-nand2003, p463;Mintel, 2010;Ryu & Jang, 2007).

Vision about luxury restaurant
At first, the causes of people tendency for using the luxury restaurant should be found.Previous research suggests that people have certain needs and the customer needs, such as being unique, being happy, or being exposed to public view, must be satisfied.These needs may provoke some psychological forces that drive consumers towards luxury goods.Previous studies have shown that the customers' behavior in searching luxuries is due to the various motivations (Bearden and Etzel, 1982).According to Vigneron and Johnson (1999), 5 customer types distinguishes them in their motivational features.These two researchers have classified the customer motivations as conspicuous, uniqueness, social, hedonism, and perfectionism.If the "materialism" is defined as a belief that the material objects are the expression of ownership and position, then two of these incentives namely conspicuous and social can be considered as materialism.These two incentives have been developed based on the mutual effects between people: Tendency to conspicuous will lead customers to purchase goods that show their superiority compared with a reference group and customers who have social incentives tend to purchase a luxury brands that represents their belonging to a particular social group.Materialistic motivations emanating from inner desires are tendency to position and wealth.More materialistic customers likely believe that the luxury brand creates a sense of satisfaction and these people based their judging about their own and the other's success on the ownership of luxury brand so materialistic motivations can justify the consumption of luxury goods (Richins, 1994).The uniqueness motive may represent the customers' psychological tendency to the uniqueness instead of similarity to the others (Richins, 1994).Some researchers believe that most people would like to see themselves as a unique person than someone like others.They believe that people valorize more for unique things that it is difficult to get.Discovery and presentation of material wealth may give people the feeling that they are different from others (Tian et al., 2001).Three behavioral aspects can be considered in the research on uniqueness: mismatch in the innovative selections, mismatch in non-conventional selections, and avoiding homology (Tian et al., 2001).Mismatch in the selection of innovative selections means that others can be affecting in consumers decisions while searching social distinctions.Mismatch in unconventional selections indicates breaking the rules, traditions, or take the risk of social rejection when people believe that they are just like everyone else.We used avoidance of similarity as our criterion for the uniqueness.Motivation of uniqueness can be seen as a reason to consume luxury goods, because the luxury goods are less available than nonluxury goods from the public view (Holtzhausen & Strydom, 2006).Hedonism motivation is based on consumer pleasure of the visual image, fantasy and physical sensations such as taste, sound, smell, touch, and is the expression of individual experience of these goods.Customers who gain the sense of pleasure from buying luxury goods, can be considered as pleasure-oriented consumers of these goods.So it can be said that the customers who are considering hedonism achieve Intuitive reward for using these luxury goods.
Perfectionism motivation refers to the psychological tendencies to perform duties thoroughly.Perfectionism can be seen as following up feature to achieve high human standards.Customers expect that a luxury brand has the highest quality.High prices may be equal to better products and superior service in the minds of most people; because most people believe that the high price reflects the good quality.Perfectionist customers give more importance to the quality and guarantee and luxury brands means the better quality in their view compared with the nonluxury goods.Customers who are looking for perfectionism may like luxury goods because in their minds the high price of these goods is an indicator of quality (Groth and McDaniel, 1993;Vigneron & Johnson, 2004).Consequently 4 motives of materialism, uniqueness, hedonism and perfectionism can be considered as a justification for using the luxury goods.Luxury goods and luxury restaurants offer services that are non-tangible, nonessential, inseparable and imperfect (Vigneron & Johnson, 1999).
These 4 incentives can be considered as possible factors influencing the views about luxury restaurants.However, these hypotheses need further examination and discussion.Therefore, this study would examine whether this principle can be generalized to restaurant context or not.
The following hypotheses have been proposed in this field: Hypothesis 1: Motivations affect one's view towards luxury restaurant.

1-A :
The customer tendency to materialism affect his/her views about luxury restaurants.

1-B :
The customer tendency to uniqueness affect his/her views about luxury restaurants.

1-C :
The customer tendency to hedonism affect his/her views about luxury restaurants.

1-D :
The customer tendency to perfectionism affect his/her views about luxury restaurants.

The impact of demographic characteristics on customers' views about the luxury restaurant
The current market approach suggests that customers are increasing and diversifying.Luxury restaurant managers likely consider different strategies for various segments of customers.However there are still defects in researches about demographic characteristics of the luxury restaurant customers (Francese, 2002).We have studied 3 demographic characteristics: gender, age and income.The first case namely gender can be considered as a very important factor in view towards a luxury restaurant.Customers with different genders have various views about the luxury restaurant.Considering previous studies that have concluded that men and women have different ways of processing information, The Guardian (2002) noted in a report that men more consider pomp based on a product's brand than women, and they prefer luxurious life more than women.Men and women each have different reasons for buying luxury goods.So we assume that gender can affect the vision about the luxury restaurant (Gardyn, 2002).Second, the age can be considered as an important and influential factor on views in the context of the luxury restaurants.Previous studies give more importance for considering the needs of older population and have raised more different marketing strategies.On the other hand, some studies have noted that the new generation is the major customers of luxury restaurants.Another study shows that the younger generation are the major customers of the market.Few studies have also been conducted to assess which generations have the most positive view about luxury restaurants (Holtzhausen & Strydom, 2006).
The third factor is "income" that is applied to valuate views of different communities (low, medium and high income) to luxury restaurant.According to the standard price theory, the higher deciles of income are more inclined to use of luxury goods than low-income people.However, recent findings show that not only high-income class, but also low-income people purchase significant amount of luxury goods.Since little research has been done about attitudes toward luxury restaurant from the perspective of income, investigating whether the income is effective on the people's view is deemed useful.Therefore, we hypothesize that a particular class in terms of income more than other classes reveal a tendency toward luxury restaurant (Francese, 2002;Vieregge et al., 2007).
The following hypotheses are proposed based on the literature review: Hypothesis 2: The demographic characteristics affect people's view about luxury goods.

2.A:
Gender affects people's view about luxury goods.

2.B:
Age affects people's view about luxury goods.

2.C:
Income affect people's view about luxury goods.

Service quality in luxury restaurants
Restaurant industry is different from other luxury products because it sells a disposable service.Services have unique features such as being intangible, heterogeneous, impossibility of discrimination and mortality that most of goods lack these features.Luxury hotels that also offer hospitality services are similar to luxury restaurants in this respect.In the researches related to luxury hotels, these hotel are distinguished from nonluxury hotels based on the specialized services level.Likewise, it is expected that luxury restaurants seek providing high quality of service.Few studies have been devoted to investigate the service quality in luxury restaurants, Although Pomp-oriented customer's demand for high quality services is very important in the way of creating customer loyalty in luxury restaurants.In this study, we attempt to explain the impact of incentives and demographic characteristics on the consumer's attitude towards service quality in luxury restaurants (Kim et al., 2006).
Accordingly, the following hypothesis can be offered: Hypothesis 3: Motivations and demographic characteristics affect the service quality in luxury restaurants.

Relationship between service quality and price in public attitude towards luxury restaurants
On the quality of services, this research uses definition of Brady et al. (2002) and Rust and Oliver (1994) based on using overall impression of service quality in assessing customers in terms of three different dimensions as the basis for measuring service quality.These three dimensions are: 1) the quality of interaction -interaction between customers and employees; 2) the quality of service environment -the overall atmosphere of the store and the service environment; and 3) the quality of the outcome -the actual service that the customer receives (Brady et al., 2002).Regarding price, it should also be noted that when customers decide to buy based on paying less; we interpret it as awareness of price.This problem occurs when customers are unwilling to pay more to acquire a distinctive feature of a product.These customers tend to use the low-cost policies and using price as a standard for judging purchase.Awareness of price is an important indicator in buying.Knowing the high price means that customer tends to take advantage of low prices tactics.One of the most important attractive factors for customers in buying is low price.This issue leads to increasing the likelihood of purchase by the customer (Lichtenstein et al., 1993).On the other hand, the price can be seen as a means to reduce risk.
When buying a product is coupled with the high risk in the customer view, he/she will be less willing to purchase.This problem leads to relationship between quality and price and customers consider higher price as better quality that in turn leads to reducing awareness of price.These people choose the goods with higher prices to avoid the risk of buying.In contrast, when the risk of a product from the customer view is low, this interlinking of quality and price will be reduced and leads to increase the customer awareness of price and the customer will be seeking cheaper goods (Romaniuk & Sharp, 2003).
Hence, the following hypothesis is proposed: Hypothesis 4: 4-1 Price affects the customer's attitude towards luxury restaurants.

4.2
Price affects the Services quality.

Research methodology
This study uses a nonexperimental research -Survey methodology.The questionnaire consists of 4 parts.The first part of this study is designed to assess demographic information such as gender, age and income.The second part of this form assesses the consumers' motivations -materialism, uniqueness, hedonism and perfectionism (see Appendix).Materialism scale of Richins (1994Richins ( , 2004) ) which includes 9 items is used here.Other criteria were also used to assess the hedonism motivation with 11 items.Perfectionism scale of Bergman et al. (2007) was also used, which consists of 10 items.In third section, the respondents present their overall attitudes towards luxury restaurants in a 5-point Likert scale (see Appendix).In the fourth section, the respondents express their views about the quality of services in luxury restaurants.This 29-item investigates the service quality from different aspects.We recognize 8 out of 29 items usable for luxury restaurants.An overall view regarding service quality will be judged according to these 8 dimensions: service quality, quality of food, clean dining environment, right place, serving food at right time, visually attractive environment, trained and professional staff and integrated services.In the fifth section, the price item was evaluated by three questions from the respondents (see Appendix).Target population for this study consists of qualified people in luxury restaurants, the statistical sample includes the customers of some restaurants of Tehran city with the brand of "Sun Live" and "luxury gold".During 4 days in the month of December 2014, 253 participants among all qualified individuals in Tehran were selected using random sampling.

Descriptive Statistics
As can be seen in Fig. 1, most of the statistical sample are Females (52%), aged between 40 to 50 years (35%), with master's degree (38%), respectively.Also, 113 of these Group (45%) have income between 4 and 5 million respectively.Other demographic characteristics are shown in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1. Personal characteristics of the participants
According to Table 2, the hedonism variable has the highest mean (3.60) and the uniqueness variable has the least mean of (3.51).The distribution of materialism variable data is also due to the high standard deviation of (0.86).According to the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, the significance level for all variables is greater than 0.05 and this means the confirmation of normal distribution hypothesis of data.So the structural equation modeling and parametric tests can be used for data analysis.Before examining the hypotheses for identifying correlations between research variables, the SPSS software 16 and Spearman correlation test were used because of the ordinal nature of the data.Correlation analysis shows that all variables had significance correlation ("a" symbol in table means the significant relationship at significance level of 1 % (p <0.01).Also, because the correlation coefficient is positive, we can say there is a significant correlation between variables (Table 3).

Measurement models
Structural equation models are required to test two models.The first model consists of a measurement model for each latent variable.Measurement model indicates the factor loadings of observed variables (factors) for each of latent variables.The commonly used fit indices in measurement models for latent variables are provided in Table 4.Among fitting indices if the ratio of the Chi-square to degree of freedom be less than 2, then the model has good fitting.RMSEA index less than 0.05 is desirable.For other indicators also whatever be closer to 1 is more desirable.As can be seen, the fitting main indicators of all latent variables are in good and acceptable range and in general it can be said the partial models of research are fitted properly.

Structural equation model
After testing the measurement models, it is necessary to provide the structural model that represents the relationship between latent variables.A structural model can be used to evaluate the research hypotheses.The research structural model was developed using Amos software version 18.According to normality test, in the structural model the critical ratio of Mardia Coefficient is 6.51 and smaller than 10.In addition, Skewness or Kurtosis values for all variables are also between +3 and -3, so data of the overall model are normal.

Judging about the research hypotheses
As shown in Table 6, Level of significance for the relationships of materialism and hedonism with attitudes towards luxury restaurant and also the relationship between materialism and the services' quality was achieved higher than 0.05 and so these hypotheses are rejected.Other research hypotheses are confirmed according to what is given in Table 6 (the level of significance is smaller than 0.05).The standardized coefficient values for the relationships between motivation, demography and price and attitudes towards luxury restaurant are respectively 20, 34 and 29, respectively.About the demographic variables, the relationship between age and education with attitudes towards luxury restaurant was estimated to be very poor.To test the relationship between gender and attitudes about luxury restaurant, the two independent samples t-test was used.Test results are shown in Table 7.As can be seen, the level of calculated t-value (0.259) is less than t-value of table (1.96) and the significance level of 0.795 is greater than 0.05.Therefore, we can confirm the null hypothesis and the research hypothesis is rejected.This means that the average view about luxury restaurants has no significant difference between men and women.

Discussion and Conclusion
The purpose of this study was to determine factors influencing attitudes towards luxury restaurants and attitudes towards service quality in these restaurants.Different critical factors in the luxury restaurant can include service quality, food quality, menu items, staff and the interaction with the customers.This study has examined whether the prices and motives and demographic characteristics affect attitudes towards luxury restaurant and also customer's views about the service quality at these restaurants or not.The results show that customers who prefer perfectionism and uniqueness, had positive attitudes towards the luxury restaurants, while customers who seek materialism and hedonism did not have desirable views towards these restaurants.People with less income had a more negative attitudes towards these restaurants than people with middle and high levels of income.Customers who likes materialism less considered the association between luxury restaurants and service quality, while customers who like uniqueness, hedonism and perfectionism, saw the strong relation between these two categories.Finally, we have found that psychological motives and demographic factors were determinants of attitudes towards the services quality in the luxury restaurants.The price also affects the consumer's attitude about luxury restaurants and demographic characteristics such as age, income and education had an impact on the consumer's attitudes to this restaurant.The new hypothesis was also tested as the effect of price on service quality that this hypothesis was confirmed and indicated that customers who are concerned about the price also insisted on service quality.Services quality in restaurants is one of the most important components in providing the customer's needs.As a marketing strategy, a luxury restaurant operators need to understand the desires of the service quality in different target groups and emphasize on the quality of services.
So we can consider this issue in future researches that one of the possible approaches in future studies is to compare different characteristics of restaurants and luxury goods.At the end it can be said that this research has important achievements in academic environments.The first point is that the studies that already containing definitions of a luxury brand are addressed this issue were based on price and quality.However, the definition of luxury restaurants is a little different from the luxury goods because the restaurant is a service section.So it is hard to achieve an easy and convenient definition of it.This study has illustrated us how customers define luxury restaurant.

Limitations of the study and suggestions for future research
Although this research proposed several strategies for the marketing researches about the luxury restaurant, but there are some limitations on it.The first point is that our population was only consisted of 253 members which is very limited.Because of the small sample size and the spatial limitations of the study (Tehran) it cannot be fully representative of the whole community.The income and age distribution of the sample is also uneven, however, given the diversity in this field throughout Iran, the results can be generalized to a larger population.The second problem is the definition of luxury restaurant.Although future studies using the existent information on the definition of luxury restaurants can minimize these limitations, however, further studies are needed to define the luxury restaurant.These studies however should probably pay more attention to the shopping behavior in luxury restaurants.
Third, this research is limited to the consumer's attitudes towards luxury restaurant.Future researches may take into account the willingness of people to return to the restaurants considering the loyalty to the brand.
Fig. 2 also shows the structural model of research (modified) with standard coefficient.

Table 1
Calculation of variables' reliability According to Table 1, alpha coefficients are higher than 0.7 and therefore questions have the desirable reliability.

Table 2
Descriptive statistics for research variables and Kolmogorov-Smirnov test

Table 4
The fitting indices of the measuring models of research latent variables

Table 6
Estimation indexes of research model to test research hypotheses

Table 7
The results of attitudes towards luxury restaurant in terms of gender