Designing Everyday Luxury: How Staff Behavior Shapes Micro-Luxury Experiences and Customer Spending

Abstract

This study investigates the psychological and sociological mechanisms through which micro-luxury service experiences generate meaning, shape consumer identity, and influence willingness to pay among young Indian consumers. Framed within the broader discourse on the democratisation of luxury and the experiential turn in consumption, the research addresses a significant gap in the literature: the near-absence of qualitative, experience-centred inquiry into everyday luxury in the Indian context. Drawing on 42 in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted across urban India, the study employs reflexive thematic analysis — informed by self-congruity theory, savoring theory, social comparison theory, Bourdieu's cultural capital framework, and service experience design scholarship — to generate theoretically grounded insight into how small, accessible luxury encounters are perceived, valued, and woven into consumer self-narratives. The findings reveal that micro-luxury experiences function simultaneously as instruments of self-affirmation, social positioning, emotional regulation, and aesthetic self-expression. Critically, the quality of employee behaviour and the deliberateness of service personalisation emerge as the primary drivers of perceived luxury value — outweighing product attributes, price, and even physical environment in their impact on consumer satisfaction and spending behaviour. The study contributes to consumer psychology, service management, and luxury marketing by developing a conceptual model of the micro-luxury experience, identifying actionable implications for staff training and experience design, and offering a culturally situated account of aspirational consumption among a significant and underrepresented consumer population.