Conscious Luxury

Consumer Research Center of The Conference Board has done the global survey about luxury consumers.

For majority 'luxury is having enough time to do whatever you want and being able to afford it.' Time is followed by experiences, comfort, beauty and quality.
The survey results indicates that there is the shift in people's meaning on what luxury is. More people seem to think about luxury not in terms of materials things, but more in terms of experiences and state of mind. It is the natural result of changing world and distribution of means in the Western societies. Parallel with uber-luxury, fabulous lives ala Beckham or Paris Hilton,  luxury became more mass than ever - more people can afford the luxury bags, clothes and cars. There are also more mass brands that are clever to add luxury touch to their products via clever marketing moves. The definition of  luxury isn't the same as it used to be, it doesn't have the same role of being the dividing line between classes. Luxury products consumption used to be the way to achieve prestige and higher social status. 

Today, more people discover the meaningless of consumption, its negative consequences for our society and planet and the decreasing value of luxury products - they guarantee no longer the desired position on the society ladder. Therefore we chose to move from being conspicuous consumers into conscious consumers. Conscious consumer who consumer less in the name of  luxury. It doesn't mean we will spend less, we will buy less products, but those will be of very high quality and of course high price. It will be still material things we will use to find our identity and mark our position, but those things will be disguised in emotions, statements and opinions.

Tags: luxury, consumption, trends