Luxury Brand Coolness.pdf

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at: https://www.emerald.com/insight/0959-6119.htm Coolness...

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at: https://www.emerald.com/insight/0959-6119.htm Coolness and Is coolness important to luxury customer hotel brand management? The brand engagement linking and moderating mechanisms between coolness 2425 and customer brand engagement Received 6 October 2021 Revised 20 December 2021 28 February 2022 Nguyen Huu Khoi 15 March 2022 Accepted 16 March 2022 Department of Marketing, Nha Trang University, Nha Trang, Vietnam and University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and Angelina Nhat-Hanh Le School of Management, University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam Abstract Purpose – This study aims to contribute by forming the concept of luxury hotel brand (four- and five-star hotel) coolness and revealing its promoting role to customer brand engagement with brand satisfaction and brand love as connecting components and materialism as a contingent factor. Design/methodology/approach – A conditional model linking luxury hotel brand coolness and customer brand engagement is proposed and tested using the partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS- SEM) technique on a data set of 284 customers. Findings – Luxury hotel brand coolness reflecting various brand qualities fosters satisfaction and love, which facilitate CBE. Materialism positively moderates the impact of luxury hotel brand coolness on brand satisfaction and love. Research limitations/implications – Future studies should further generalize the findings by extending the current research on different hospitality services and luxury consumption. Also, more personality traits and personal values should be investigated as moderators. Practical implications – Luxury hotel brand management should place brand coolness at the center of luxury hotel brand strategies. Originality/value – This study fills in the gap of unraveling the central role of luxury hotel brand coolness in fostering customer brand engagement with brand satisfaction and love as catalysts and materialism as a contingent condition. Keywords Luxury hotel brand coolness, Brand satisfaction and brand love, Customer brand engagement, Materialism, Moderating effects Paper type Research paper 1. Introduction Coolness has shown its important marketing implications by generating fruitful and positive outcomes in various settings (Bogicevic et al., 2021; Kim and Park, 2019). Recently, International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality the context of hospitality and tourism services (HTS) have witnessed the increasing Management Vol. 34 No. 7, 2022 pp. 2425-2449 © Emerald Publishing Limited 0959-6119 This research is funded by University of Economics Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam. DOI 10.1108/IJCHM-10-2021-1230 IJCHM attention to coolness – a positive valenced perception (Warren et al., 2019) – as a precedent 34,7 for a wide range of desirable outcomes, for example, satisfaction, attachment and behavioral intention (Bogicevic et al., 2021). Nevertheless, the developed literature on coolness in this context has recently demonstrated some significant gaps that need to be filled to provide scholars and managers with valuable insights into the role of coolness. Previous studies have largely ignored coolness as a potential contributor to brand strategies 2426 in the domain of luxury hotels. The luxury hotel domain, which includes four- and five-star hotels (Rather and Hollebeek, 2019), is a rough segmentation in which hotel brands fiercely compete to retrieve holistic consumer values (Ahn and Back, 2018; Kim et al., 2020). In this sense, luxury hotel brands have adopted different brand strategies to achieve consumers’ values (Garmaroudi et al., 2021; Le et al., 2021). While brand coolness is important for brand- related consequences (Warren et al., 2019), it seems, however, that none of the previous studies have adopted the concept of luxury hotel brand coolness (LBC) to clarify why this brand characteristic enhances luxury hotel brands’ competitive advantages by winning consumers’ hearts and minds. Accordingly, a holistic conceptualization of brand coolness in the context of the luxury hotel should be formed (Warren et al., 2019), and a subsequent investigation into the role of LBC in improving luxury hotel brand strategies should be conducted. In addition, luxury hotel brand strategies aim at building, developing and consolidating the association between brands and consumers (Guan et al., 2021; Le et al., 2021). It is suggested that when a luxury hotel brand successfully establishes a solid, two-way connection with its customers, that brand can then fully harvest customer values (Garmaroudi et al., 2021; Zhang et al., 2020b). The evolution of marketing philosophy (Kumar et al., 2019) has recently emphasized customer engagement, and the domain of luxury hotels is no exception (Kim et al., 2020; Roy et al., 2018). From this perspective, the mechanism associating brand coolness and customer brand engagement (CBE) should be established. Yet, such an association has not been examined, creating a gap in the development of luxury hotel brand strategies to extract customer values. CBE can be considered direct and indirect contributions of consumers to a brand (Kumar et al., 2019), which requires brand satisfaction and love as catalysts (Pansari and Kumar, 2016). Furthermore, brand coolness is suggested to generate consumer satisfaction and love toward a brand since a cool brand offers values and creates symbolic fulfillment (Warren et al., 2019). Thus, in the luxury hotel setting, LBC can foster CBE via brand satisfaction and love (Choi and Kandampully, 2019; Guan et al., 2021; Kim et al., 2020; Rather and Hollebeek, 2019). Paving a way from LBC to CBE with brand satisfaction and brand love as the bricks can provide scholars and managers with additional knowledge of luxury hotel brand strategies. Finally, a deeper and broader luxury hotel brand strategy of coolness can be enhanced by proposing a contingent condition under which LBC generates stronger brand satisfaction and brand love and, thus, more substantial links to CBE. Materialism is a widespread personal value that is foundational for passion and attachment for luxury and luxury consumption behaviors in different contexts (Fastoso and Gonz
alez-Jiménez, 2020), including the hospitality industry (Hultman et al., 2015; Kim and Jang, 2016; Lee and Hwang, 2011). However, the understanding of how materialism can influence the brand strategy of brand coolness is underexplored. Therefore, materialism is integrated into the research model as a moderator to transform the simple direct effects into conditional effects to shed more light on how and why luxury brand coolness fosters CBE. To conclude, the contributions of the current study to the luxury hotel brand strategies are three-fold. First, the brand coolness conceptualization established in a previous study is derived to form one for the context of the luxury hotel industry. Second, the central position of brand coolness in luxury hotel brand strategies is highlighted by developing and empirically testing a model of the relationship between LBC and CBE, in which brand Coolness and satisfaction and love act as a bridge. Finally, more implications for the luxury hotel brand customer strategies are generated by investigating a contingent situation in which LBC is linked to higher brand satisfaction and love and is consequently more strongly connected to CBE. brand engagement 2. Literature review and hypothesis development 2.1 Luxury hotel brand coolness 2427 Coolness has shown its important marketing implications in different settings, including technological products (Tiwari et al., 2021), fashion (Loureiro et al., 2020), consumption process (Im et al., 2015), personality (Dar-Nimrod et al., 2018) and brand (Loureiro and Blanco, 2021). Recently, HTS have witnessed increased attention to coolness as a precedent for a wide range of desirable outcomes (Bogicevic et al., 2021; Cha, 2020; Kock, 2021). Some studies in the luxury domain (Apaolaza et al., 2020; Loureiro et al., 2020) have mentioned the significant role of coolness. However, as emphasized by Warren et al. (2019), marketers want to foster cool brands, but they do not have a relevant understanding of brand coolness and its characteristics. Thus, how coolness contributes to luxury hotel brand strategies is unclarified in this context. Warren et al. (2019) define this concept as “a subjective and dynamic, socially constructed positive trait attributed to cultural objects inferred to be appropriately autonomous [...]” and conceptualize it as a high-order variable with 10 components: extraordinary, energetic, aesthetic, original, authentic, high status, rebellious, subcultural, iconic and popular (see Appendix 1 for the detail description). As the components of brand coolness can be different between settings (e.g. goods and services) or customer segmentations (e.g. standard and luxury; Warren et al., 2019), we form the conceptualization of LBC based on the fit between brand coolness aspects and what consumers seek from a luxury hotel brand. First, the desirability perspective of brand coolness is well-documented in this context. More specifically, consumers consistently seek memorable and extraordinary service quality and experience (Ahn and Back, 2018; Liu et al., 2017). Scholars have also proposed that consumers’ experience and perception toward the servicescape and social cues such as frontline employees can be transferred into brand perceptions (Garmaroudi et al., 2021). Since the frontline employees of a luxury hotel brand require qualities such as enthusiasm and energy (Wang et al., 2021; Wu et al., 2020), an energetic luxury hotel brand should also be desirable by consumers. Furthermore, the aesthetic perspective of a luxury hotel brand has been emphasized in previous studies (Kim et al., 2020). Thus, the desirability perspective of brand coolness is adopted in the current study. Second, the positive autonomy aspect of brand coolness, which includes originality and authenticity, is also widely accepted as the most sought-after attribute of luxury hotel brands. Consumers show the need for originality through the favor of the uniqueness of luxury hotel services (Manthiou et al., 2018). Besides, some scholars have demonstrated that brand authenticity has an important role in fostering consumers’ brand loyalty, which means that an authentic luxury hotel brand is significant to consumers (Manthiou et al., 2018; Zhang et al., 2020b). As a result, positive autonomy is also used in the present study to conceptualize LBC. Third, consumers use luxury hotel services to improve their social status (Jang and Moutinho, 2019), implying that high status should be a component of LBC. Besides, the literature (Correia et al., 2019; Zhang et al., 2020b) suggests that culture-based hotel service design and innovation create unique competitiveness that enhances customers’ satisfaction and loyalty, meaning that iconic should be a characteristic of LBC. Furthermore, as referrals and recommendations are influential in the luxury hotel domain (Giglio et al., 2020; IJCHM Yang and Mattila, 2016), we expect that a popular (well-known and liked by many people) 34,7 luxury hotel brand is attractive to consumers (Park and Ahn, 2021). Altogether, this study further integrates high status, iconic and popular into the conceptualization of LBC. Finally, scholars have suggested luxury hotel brands should devote their effort to become popular and liked by consumers by, for example, strictly following luxury hotel service standards (Kotler et al., 2017). Therefore, we reason that subcultural and rebellious seem not to be 2428 suitable and thus do not integrate them into the conceptualization of LBC. 2.2 Customer brand engagement Contemporary HTS have shown considerable interest in customer engagement because of its relationship with brand performance, such as customer cocreation, sales growth and profitability (Li and Wei, 2021; Zhang et al., 2020a). Among different types of customer engagement mentioned in previous studies (Hao, 2020), CBE has established an important theme to win customers’ hearts and minds, generating sustainable competitive advantages and healthy brand development (Kumar et al., 2019). CBE can be understood as a vital measure through which brands can evaluate and improve their dynamic and iterative process of interaction, relationship quality and emotional attachment governance (Kumar et al., 2019; So et al., 2021). Currently, conceptualizations of CBE adopted in the context of HTS reflect the multifaceted nature of this variable, including cognitive, affective and activation (Hollebeek et al., 2014); identification, enthusiasm, attention, absorption and interaction (So et al., 2014); and purchase, referral, influence and customer knowledge (Pansari and Kumar, 2016). It should be noted that Harrigan et al. (2017) have argued the for the majority overlap between the components proposed by Hollebeek et al. (2014) and So et al. (2014). Thus, they imply that CBE is part of the customers’ deep psychological processes (e.g. cognitive, affective and activation; Hollebeek et al., 2014; So et al., 2021) acting as linking factors between cocreation activities (e.g. experience) and positive outcomes (Harrigan et al., 2017), and indirectly measuring brand performance. Meanwhile, the conceptualization of Kumar and Pansari (2016) is more comprehensive in terms of directly measuring brand performance as it “encompasses all customer activities” bringing values to brands (p. 295), reflecting the fact that consumers contribute to brands with both nontransactional and transactional interactions (Itani et al., 2019). Furthermore, it is more suitable for the purpose of the current study, which is to radically uncover the contribution of LBC to brand performance and success. This conceptualization is also utilized in previous studies in the HTS domain (Itani et al., 2019; Wu et al., 2018). Thus, it is adopted for and within the present study. A brief explanation of the four components of CBE is presented in Appendix 1. 2.3 The potential contribution of brand coolness to luxury hotel brand strategies The ultimate aim of luxury hotel brand strategies is to foster the process of consumers’ value creation and contribution, i.e. CBE (Kumar et al., 2019; Le et al., 2021), which is reflected by purchase, referral, influence and customer knowledge (Kumar and Pansari, 2016). The literature review (Appendix 2) has demonstrated that various brand strategies, including quality and equity (Liu et al., 2017; Yang and Lau, 2015), emotions, aesthetic perception, authenticity (Choi and Kandampully, 2019; Kim et al., 2020), brand experience as well as luxury value (Ahn and Back, 2018; Guan et al., 2021), have been adopted to investigate particular aspects of customer engagement. However, previous studies have put less attention on the role of brand coolness in facilitating a full breadth and depth of CBE in this field. Interestingly, luxury brand coolness shows a close connection with previously investigated luxury brand strategies and, thus, Coolness and can foster the retrieval of consumers’ values (Warren et al., 2019). For example, the customer extraordinary and aesthetically appealing perspectives can link to quality and equity of the luxury brand, while extraordinary, aesthetic, original, authentic and energetic components brand can elicit emotions, aesthetic and authentic perceptions (Kim and Park, 2019; Warren et al., engagement 2019). The abovementioned characteristics, along with high status, generate the memorable experience and luxury values, including functional (Wu and Yang, 2018), experiential (Zhang et al., 2020b) and symbolic values (Wu and Yang, 2018). As such, it can be a broad 2429 yet significant indicator to evaluate how well the brand’s performance is. 2.4 Luxury hotel brand coolness as an antecedent of brand satisfaction and brand love In the luxury hotel domain, satisfaction can be defined as the overall evaluation of a brand’s performance (Rather and Hollebeek, 2019). According to the expectation disconfirmation theory (Oliver, 1980), satisfaction with a luxury hotel brand stems from cognitive evaluations (i.e. comparisons; Oliver, 1980) between consumers’ expectations and a brands’ performance (Choi et al., 2017; Le et al., 2021) regarding both cognitive and emotional experience. Such cognitive evaluations form consumer satisfaction when consumers’ expectations are met or exceeded and vice versa. Although some previous studies have highlighted the significant role of satisfaction as well as love (Choi and Kandampully, 2019; Le et al., 2021), how LBC is related to brand satisfaction and brand love is still unclarified. Following the expectation disconfirmation perspective (Oliver, 1980), we propose that a cool luxury hotel brand can meet consumers’ expectations by offering various values (e.g. utilitarian, emotional and symbolic values) and thus, contributes to their satisfaction (Zhang et al., 2020b). In the context of the luxury hotel brand, functional values refer to the capacity for functional, utilitarian or physical performance (Wu and Yang, 2018). The extraordinary aspect of a cool hotel luxury brand reflects the ability to offer superior functional performance and thus fosters the perception of functional values. Furthermore, since consumers adopt the notion that a beautiful object (e.g. a brand) implies it is good and usable, we strongly argue that the aesthetic perspective of a luxury hotel brand also contributes to functional value perceptions. In addition, emotional values imply the capacity to arouse feelings or affective states (Wu and Yang, 2018). Some components of a cool luxury hotel brand can elicit emotional responses, including extraordinary, aesthetic, original, authentic and energetic. The cognitive appraisal theory (Johnson and Stewart, 2005) proposed that the cognitive evaluations of the extraordinary aspect can elicit emotions and create emotional values. Furthermore, as the aesthetic perspective is an affective component of brand coolness (Warren et al., 2019), it can evoke consumers’ emotional responses (Kim and Park, 2019). Also, the original facet fosters the perception of distinction or specialty, which facilitates the feelings of being different, and thus, it can generate experiential feelings and values for consumers (Kim and Park, 2019). In the luxury hotel sector, authenticity (Zhang et al., 2020b) and energy (Warren et al., 2019) can mark a solid and memorable experience in consumers’ minds, which can promote positive feelings toward it. Therefore, authentic and energetic aspects of brand coolness can yield emotional values. Finally, symbolic values refer to the attachment or association of psychological meaning to a brand (Wu and Yang, 2018). In the context of the luxury hotel, the symbolic values link to the desires of signaling the social status and economic power (Wu and Yang, 2018), which is consistent with the high-status facet of brand coolness. Furthermore, consumers use luxury hotel brands due to their uniqueness, which helps them express their lifestyles and image (Correia et al., 2019; Wu and Yang, 2018). Thus, the consumers’ need for uniqueness can be met by the original aspect of IJCHM LBC. A cool luxury hotel brand, therefore, fosters symbolic values. Since LBC promotes 34,7 functional, emotional and symbolic values, which are antecedents of brand satisfaction, we propose that: H1. LBC positively influences brand satisfaction. Carroll and Ahuvia (2006) proposed that consumers tend to have higher love for brands that 2430 fulfill their desires of symbolic values. Therefore, we expect that a cool luxury hotel brand, through high status and originality, can provide symbolic values such as signaling the social status and economic power and expressing their lifestyles and image (Chen and Peng, 2014; Correia et al., 2019), and thus, it would foster brand love in consumers. It is also suggested that a self-expressive brand is expected to foster the developing and consolidating love (Carroll and Ahuvia, 2006; Vlachos et al., 2010). Some components of LBC, including positive autonomy, high status and iconic, are value-expressive in nature (Warren et al., 2019). It is, therefore, expected that a cool luxury hotel brand contributes to consumers’ brand love. Furthermore, social needs fulfillment generated by a brand can boost bonding and create an emotional attachment, which may form a strong long-term relationship and promote self-brand integration, thus leading to brand love (Batra et al., 2012). LBC is a socially constructed concept, implying that consumers’ consumption of the brand will improve their social membership (e.g. exclusive, upper class, glamorous and sophisticated; Warren et al., 2019). Taken altogether, we propose that: H2. LBC positively influences brand love. 2.5 Brand satisfaction, love and customer brand engagement In the hospitality services domain, satisfaction is one of the pillars forming the relationship quality between consumers and a brand (Itani et al., 2019), while brand love fosters brand trust and commitment, the two remaining pillars of relationship quality (Le et al., 2021). According to the theory of engagement, “when a firm achieves [...] a satisfied and emotional relationship with the customer, we can say that the firm and the customer are engaged with each other” (Pansari and Kumar, 2016, pp. 298–299). CBE, therefore, can be considered a result of the evolution of the customer-brand relationship while emphasizing that a consumer engages with a brand in a betrothed relationship only if there exists a quality association between them (Kumar et al., 2019). This argument is in line with various conceptual works that highlight the predictive role of relationship quality toward customer engagement (Pansari and Kumar, 2016). Thus, it can be reasoned that building and consolidating a satisfied and emotional relationship with their consumers would promote their engagement with brands, harvesting direct (i.e. purchase) and indirect (i.e. referral, influence and customer knowledge) values offered by those consumers. It is argued that consumers who perceive their relationship with a brand as having been satisfied are more likely to contribute to that brand’s performance (e.g. marketing and sales efforts) by conducting various engagement behaviors (Zhang et al., 2020a) due to the norm of reciprocity emphasized by, for example, the social exchange theory (Rather and Hollebeek, 2019). While relationship quality plays an important role in fostering CBE, it is undoubtedly true that CBE is less likely to arise in the absence of strong emotional bonds between the customer and a brand because, with love for that brand, consumers treat themselves as part of it, as if it were their own, and devote their hearts and minds to the brand (Ahn and Back, 2018). Also, brand love is expected to motivate consumers to approach the brand more frequently, generating consumer-brand interdependence, trust and commitment (Le et al., 2021). Thus, through establishing a satisfied and emotional Coolness and relationship, a brand transforms their normal consumers into active brand ambassadors customer who are prepared to reciprocate to the brand. Consistent with the above arguments, studies in the domain of luxury hotels have brand demonstrated that satisfaction is an antecedent of various CBE-related outcomes such as engagement brand loyalty (Manthiou et al., 2018), word-of-mouth (WOM) (Choi et al., 2017), referral (Choi and Kandampully, 2019) or referral (Le et al., 2021). Also, in this context, love and emotional attachment have been confirmed as agents that foster consumers to perform different 2431 components of CBE (Manthiou et al., 2018; Wu and Gao, 2019). It should be noted that while Itani et al. (2019) conduct their research in the domain of luxury restaurants, their findings also indicate that relationship quality, including satisfaction, influences overall CBE. In a more comprehensive sense, Le et al. (2021) show that satisfaction and emotional attachment lead to overall CBE in the context of luxury hotels. Thus, while it seems that satisfaction and love can influence each component of CBE, none has investigated these relationships. We, therefore, propose that: H3. Brand satisfaction positively influences purchase (a), referral (b), WOM (c) and feedback (d). H4. Brand love positively influences purchase (a), referral (b), WOM (c) and feedback (d). 2.6 The moderating role of materialism Materialism is a personal value that emphasizes the importance of ownership and acquisition of goods/services to achieve life goals or desired states and is closely related to luxury consumption behaviors in the hospitality context (Hultman et al., 2015; Kiatkawsin and Han, 2019; Lee and Hwang, 2011). Furthermore, previous studies have suggested that materialists consume luxury hospitality services due to their expensive, popular and exclusive features to retrieve unique benefits of luxury such as high performance, memorable experiential values and social status improvement (Fastoso and Gonz
alez- Jiménez, 2020; Kim and Jang, 2016). Thus, it is induced that materialists would show preference on various perspectives of luxury brand coolness such as extraordinariness and aesthetic appeal, which generate high performance; extraordinariness, aesthetic appeal, originality, authenticity and energy creating memorable experiential values, high status, and originality, and fosters social status improvement. As such, we expect that consumers who have a high level of materialism should put more importance on LBC and consequently form stronger brand satisfaction and love. Therefore, we propose that: H5. Materialism positively moderates the effect of LBC on brand satisfaction. H6. Materialism positively moderates the effect of LBC on brand love. 3. Methods 3.1 Measurement and scaling This study uses the measurement of studied constructs from previous studies. More specifically, two items measuring brand love were borrowed from Batra et al. (2012). Three items of brand satisfaction were used from Warren et al. (2019). We adapted 16 items (four components) of CBE from Kumar and Pansari (2016) and five items measuring materialism from Lee and Hwang (2011). Twenty-seven items (eight components) measuring LBC were IJCHM adopted from Warren et al. (2019). Following the argument of these authors that the 34,7 components of brand coolness should be the manifestations of this construct, together with the postulation that these components are expected to covary with each other since, for example, high status and iconic are value-expressive in nature, we reason that the conceptualization of LBC in the luxury hotel context causes its specific dimensions. Furthermore, as the meaning of each of LBC’s components remains unchanged, we further 2432 propose that energetic and aesthetic appeal are the manifestations of the second-order construct of desirability while original and authentic are the manifestations of the second- order construct of positive autonomy, both of which, along with the three components of high status, iconic and popular are the components of the third-order construct of LBC as confirmed by Warren et al. (2019). Measurement scales (Appendix 3) are Likert-scale with: 1 (completely disagree) to 5 (completely agree), except the one of brand love, which ranges from 1 (not at all) to 5 (a lot). 3.2 Data collection We used a questionnaire to collect data. It was initially developed in English and then was translated into Vietnamese by a language instructor. The back-translated to English technique was used, and then, we compared the two versions of English questionnaires, and some minor modifications were made. After that, the questionnaire was commented on by two university professors, whose specialty was tourism and hospitality management. They helped us to revise the wording while retaining the core meanings. Finally, the questionnaire was pretested by 30 domestic tourists traveling to Nha Trang city and were staying at luxury hotels. The findings indicated that respondents could clearly understand all items. The current study aimed at surveying respondents who were customers of luxury hotels in three months prior (to the survey time). With this aim, the probability sampling methods were difficult to implement since these methods required a sampling frame (i.e. the list of all consumers who stayed at a luxury hotel in the past three months in Vietnam). Consequently, the snowball sampling method was more suitable since it did not require a sampling frame, while the generalization of the sample could be improved by conducting data collection in the North, South and Central Vietnam. Regarding the required sample size, the current research used the guidance of Hair et al. (2021) and adopted the inverse square root method to calculate the required sample size. Accordingly, with the expectation that the path coefficients would be between 0.11 and 0.2, the minimum sample required should be 155 for a significance level of 5%. Therefore, this study aimed at approaching 300 respondents. The data collection was implemented in October and November of 2020. Before sending the online questionnaire to the potential respondents, we stressed that the research only cares about the perceptions of luxury hotel brands (i.e. four- and five-star hotels; Rather and Hollebeek, 2019). Also, a screening question was applied to ensure that potential respondents stayed at luxury hotels in the three months prior (to the survey time). Then, the questionnaire was distributed directly to the respondents, and they required about 25–30 min to finish. If they used more than one luxury hotel brand in the period, they were asked to select an arbitrary brand depending on their choice. To minimize the bias, we emphasized that there was no right or wrong answer and we just focused on their perceptions. A total of 300 questionnaires were collected and 16 were rejected due to the lack of information. The remaining 284 questionnaires were used for processing, generating a response rate of 94.7%. Hair et al. (2021) have postulated that the smallest sample size required for estimating a structural model with high-order construct(s) with PLS-SEM is nearly unchanged compared to a structural model with the same components modeled as first-order constructs because PLS-SEM does not estimate all the structural relationships simultaneously but rather uses OLS regressions to estimate the model’s partial regression relationships. Furthermore, the Coolness and current study (284 consumers), compared to the one of Le et al. (2021), which used PLS-SEM customer on a sample of 249 consumers to estimate a model with high-order constructs (e.g. CBE), has a similar sample size. According to Statista (2021), the average room rates among four- and brand five-star rated hotels in Vietnam in 2019 were US$73.6 and $116.6. Compared to the annual engagement income groups of the collected data, it can be inferred that those rates were affordable to consumers in the sample. Furthermore, our data collection retrieved perceptions from consumers who already used luxury hotel services. Thus, the adequacy of the collected 2433 sample, in terms of size and research context, is justified. The sample’s characteristics are presented in Appendix 4. 4. Analytical procedure 4.1 Measurement validation This study used PLS-SEM to check the reliability and validity of the measurement model and to test the structural model. As the measurement model contains high-order constructs, we adopt the disjointed two-stage approach (Sarstedt et al., 2019) to estimate models. Accordingly, we checked the reliability of the studied construct with Cronbach’s alpha and composite validity (CR); the convergence validity with factor loadings and average variance extracted (AVE); and the discriminant validity with the values of Heterotrait–Monotrait (HTMT) correlation. In Step 1, we checked the reliability and validity of first-order constructs. The results showed that all measurements of the first-order constructs were reliable and convergence validity was acceptable (Cronbach’s alpha, CR, factor loadings >= 0.7, AVEs >= 0.5). In Step 2, we check the measurements of the second-order constructs (Step 2a). The latent variables of the first-order constructs estimated in Step 1 were used as indicators of the corresponding second-order constructs. The findings showed that the reliability and validity of the two second-order constructs were satisfactory (Cronbach’s alpha, CR, factor loadings >= 0.7; AVEs >= 0.5). The reliability and validity of the third-order construct were also checked (Step 2b) and confirmed (Cronbach’s alpha, CR, factor loadings >= 0.7; AVE >= 0.5). The HTMT matrix indicated that all HTMT values were lower than 0.85, proposing that all studied constructed were discriminant (Tables 1 and 2). 4.2 Checking for common method biases To check the common method biases, we used the common latent factor (CLF) method (Podsakoff et al., 2003) justified for PLS-SEM (Liang et al., 2007). Accordingly, all first-order constructs were transformed into second-order constructs, and a CLF was added into the measurement model, in which all measurement items in the model were used as its indicators. We used bootstrap (5,000 subsamples) to retrieve factor loadings and the average variance explained. The results indicated that most factor loadings of CLF were insignificant, and the variance explained by the measurement model and CLF were 0.64 and 0.004, respectively, generating a proportion of 160:1. Thus, common method bias was less likely an issue for this research. 4.3 Hypothesis testing results Hypothesis testing results: the results shown that LBC had positive effects on brand satisfaction (H1: b = 0.42, p < 0.001) and brand love (H2: 0.27,