The two sides of nature：The influence of Awe of Nature on Consumers' Luxury Choice

Abstract: In the process of luxury consumption, companies often create scenes related to nature in promotional videos and press conferences, thus inspiring consumers’ awe. Sometimes consumers will be immersed in the beauty of natural art, feel the beauty and grandeur of nature. For example, LV designed the early spring "sunset" show, GUCCI created an immersive forest conference; However, sometimes it will let consumers fall into the fear of natural disasters, feeling the threat and destruction of nature. For example, Chanel created the "Icelandic volcano" show Balenciaga created the "snowstorm show" and so on. So do the above two different types of awe experience have different impacts on consumers’ luxury behavior? Which nature-fearing marketing practice is more likely to arouse consumers’ interest in luxury goods? To test our hypothesis, we conducted five experiments. First, experiments 1a and 1b preliminarily investigated the impact of different types of nature awe on consumers’ luxury choices. Study 1a (N = 300) is a (sense of awe of beautiful nature vs. Threat to nature vs. control group), a single-factor intersubject design in which participants performed situational recall and completed product selection tasks based on prompts. Study 1b (N = 90) once again verified the relationship between different awe emotions and consumers’ luxury choice behavior by immersive VR technology. Study 2 (N = 288) Awe of adopting beautiful nature vs. awe of threatening nature vs.. The single-factor intersubject experimental design of the control group verified the psychological mechanism of different types of natural awe on consumers’ choice of luxury goods. Study 3a (N = 192) and study 3b(N = 193) explored the boundary conditions of natural connectedness and threat sensitivity, respectively. This study examines how nature awe (beautiful nature vs. threatening nature) influences consumers’ interest in luxury products, as well as its underlying mechanisms and boundary conditions. Through five experiments, we found that different types of nature awe have different effects on consumers’ interest in luxury goods, that is, the awe of beautiful nature reduces consumers’ interest in luxury goods, while the awe of threatening nature increases consumers’ interest in luxury goods. Specifically, when immersed in the beauty of nature and generated awe, consumers perceive their own insignificance, which triggers a psychological state of self-transcendence, inhibits the desire for worldly and material things, and thus reduces the interest in luxury goods. At the same time, we found that the effect was stronger in groups with high natural connectedness; On the contrary, when immersed in threatening nature and resulting in awe, it will lead to the loss of individual sense of control, which stimulates consumers’ motivation for self-improvement and increases their interest in luxury goods. We also found that this effect only occurred in groups with high threat sensitivity. Our research has enriched the research on the pre-factors of luxury consumption and provided a new theoretical framework for explaining luxury consumption behavior. At the same time, this paper explores both "respect" and "fear", expands the existing research on awe through classification and systematic research methods, and provides marketing practice ideas for the large-scale luxury industry.