Does masstige offer the prestige of luxury without the social costs? Status and warmth perceptions from masstige and luxury signals

Can masstige consumers have their cake and eat it too? We explore how signaling through masstige (mass prestige) goods, compared with their luxury counterpart, impacts two important sociometric variables of peer popularity: status and warmth. Given recent research that has demonstrated how luxury status signaling confers to the signaler diminished perceptions of warmth, the current research investigates whether signaling through masstige products can allow consumers to enjoy the benefits of status without incurring the social cost of reduced perceived warmth. Five experimental studies lead to the conclusion that this is not the case: Masstige consumers neither gain increased perceptions of warmth nor status. The studies identify impression management as the causal mechanism (Studies 1a and 1b), introduce a way to attenuate this effect (Study 2), and consider how luxury and masstige consumers differentially identify status signals (Studies 3a and 3b).