Lifestyle of the rich and famous: Exploring the ultra-high net-worth individuals’ customer experience (UHCX)
The luxury market has been growing consistently. Academic research attributes the sector’s growth to its foundation of luxury good and brand knowledge. Scholars and managers emphasize the ever-increasing importance of the luxury experience for catering to the luxury customer. However, exploring what constitutes the luxury customer experience is a challenge. This is particularly true of ultra-high net-worth individuals (UHNWIs), comprising of 220,000 individuals with a collective net worth of more than $30 trillion. A third of all luxury sectors, such as the market for superyachts, one of which sells for an average of $10 million, depend exclusively on the UHNWI segment. By empirically exploring and conceptualizing the UHNWI customer experiences and defining superyacht owners’ overall experiences we advance our understanding of the luxury customer experience in a unique and underrepresented context. We discuss our findings’ implications for luxury research and practice, providing a future research agenda with regard to UHNWI.
