Currently, luxury brands are widely implementing environmentally friendly initiatives and striving toward sustainable development. However, the luxury industry faces a conflict between sustainable practices and the perception of luxury attributes during its transformation. The academic community has yet to clarify how these practices interact with consumers’ perceptions of luxury, thereby influencing brand equity and purchasing intent. This contradiction is referred to as the “sustainable luxury dilemma.” This study addresses this core contradiction by constructing a dual-path model that connects a brand’s sustainable initiatives, consumer biases, and the duality of brand image. Empirical tests examine how consumers’ perceptions of a brand’s “sustainability” and “luxury” interact to influence brand equity and purchase intention. Based on survey data from mainland China and Hong Kong consumers (N=291), structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to validate all 11 hypotheses (H1-H8), revealing the following core findings: 1) Among sustainability efforts such as the adoption of reused materials, zero-waste design methods, and sustainable campaign communications, zero-waste design has the strongest effect on enhancing sustainable brand image; 2) Consumer biases toward reused materials and concerns about the quality of sustainable products are negatively correlated with luxury brand image; 3) Sustainable brand image and luxury brand image independently enhance brand equity and purchase intention, and their combination produces a synergistic effect. This study quantifies the trade-off between sustainability and luxury attributes, pioneering the “sustainability-luxury dual perception” interaction model, enriching research perspectives, and addressing the binary opposition in sustainable luxury theory. Practically, the research findings suggest that luxury brands should prioritize zero waste design to balance sustainability and luxury. By strengthening the link between technology innovation in sustainability and craftsmanship heritage, luxury brands can alleviate consumer quality anxiety and resolve consumer cognitive biases.
Keywords: sustainable luxury, sustainable brand image, luxury brand image, brand equity, purchase intention
