Managing Sustainable Luxury and Digitalization

Research about luxury constantly reinvents the concept of luxury and what it is and what it is about. So is the moral perception about luxury, particularly as old- fashioned definitions do not hold anymore, such as the distinction of necessity goods and luxury goods, or the economic definition of increased demand depending on income rise. More sociological definitions link luxury to different societal "codes" and communication to form identity. Luxury thus contributes to social distinction in postmodern societies - and therefore goes back to the landmark theory of luxury from Thorstein Veblen (1899) on conspicuous consumption in his "theory of the leisure class."

However, the new aspect of understanding luxury and managing luxury prod- ucts and brands is moral - beyond the criticism of decadence and issues of social injustice: luxury consumption and behavior have been identified as one of the key drivers of climate change. As the nongovernmental organization Oxfam reported in 2020, it is the richest 1 percent who "were responsible for 15% of cumulative emissions, and 9% of the carbon budget" and the "richest 10% of the world's popu- lation (c. 630 million people) were responsible for 52% of the cumulative carbon emissions - depleting the global carbon budget by nearly a third (31%) in those 25 years [from 1990-2015] alone" (Oxfam International 2022, 2). So, the income- elasticity aspect of luxury finally leads to contributing in an exponential way to the environmental problems the world and the world population are facing. Private jets, 12-cylinder cars, and private homes with 500; 1,000; or 10,000 square meters of construction add to increased emissions, particularly in a per-head count metric. In the realm of digital technologies, the environmental dimension also plays a role. Blockchain identifiers (see Chapters 6 and 8) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are increasingly important for luxury marketing, but also add to climate change through increased emissions.