Onward and Upward

MIT says that you better look rich or your bag will look fake

From PURSEBLOG by Amanda Mull

File this under “Things That Really Shouldn’t Surprise Anyone, Ever.”

According to Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Renee Richardson Gosline (yeah, that’s right, MIT is interested in your handbag), consumers are far more likely to identify a counterfeit bag as real when worn by someone that “looks” rich and a real bag as counterfeit when worn by someone that “looks” poor. I’m not sure why that would come as a huge surprise to anyone, but the fact that its been scientifically confirmed means that we can all congratulate ourselves on being logical, I suppose..

Before you fire up the keyboard and claim in the comments that you don’t care if people think your bag is fake or that it’s shallow for people to assume things about you because you dress a certain way, please slow your roll and read the stuff after the jump.


Inherent in fashion is the desire to create a cohesive personal style and public image, and if we weren’t expecting for it to matter in some way how we portray ourselves to the world, then we’d just all wear sweatpants and Ugg boots like we all really want to, deep down (or maybe I’m projecting). And it’s okay! Caring about public perception is actually a very grown-up thing to do, no matter how many times you told your mom that you didn’t care what people thought of you as a teenager.

As it turns out, the efforts that we make on behalf of our egos are perceived pretty accurately, which is to say that people with money usually do a good job looking like they have money, and others are more likely to assume that the bags of wealthy-looking people are real. On the other hand, most people think a bag is fake if the other contextual clues in the wearer’s appearance don’t project wealth.

The most relevant conclusion of the study for people that love authentic bags is that buying a counterfeits, by itself, isn’t fooling anyone. Carrying a fake bag (one which many people might perceive as expensive in another context) isn’t enough to override everything else about someone’s appearance – instead of making the person look rich by proximity, it just makes everyone think that the bag they’re carrying is fake. That means that the people out there that bought a fake Louis Vuitton and have no other personal style to speak of wasted their money, and most people are able to accurately surmise that their bag isn’t the real thing. As it turns out, you really can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, as they say.

Bloomberg really managed to bury the lede on this article, though. All of the previous stuff seems fairly logical, but what I found most interesting was this little statistic, nestled at the end: Of women that buy counterfeit bags, 46% go on to buy the real thing within two years. People that buy fakes may think that they have one over on the rest of us bag-buying fools, but as it turns out, a lot of them are just at the beginning of a fashion progression that will ultimately turn them into the high-dollar consumers that they thought they could fool with a pleather Gucci.
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Original article via Bloomberg.com.
By Meg Tirrell

Dec. 2 (Bloomberg) -- If you want to tout that fake Louis Vuitton Le Radieux handbag as the real deal, you had better look the part, according to a Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher.

People are more likely to identify a designer handbag as authentic if the individual carrying it wears expensive clothes or has a certain aura that says rich person, the research found. The study, by Renee Richardson Gosline, an assistant professor of marketing at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, showed that shoppers can more accurately distinguish between real designer bags and fakes if given social cues.

Gosline showed 100 owners of luxury handbags photos of the items alone against blank backdrops and ones worn by people in social settings. She found that the ability to discern an item’s authenticity and the amount a shopper would pay for the product declined with the lack of context.

“Counterfeits are really not serving as a substitute for the real thing at all,” Gosline, a former brand manager for LVMH Moet Hennessey Louis Vuitton, said yesterday in a telephone interview from Cambridge, Massachusetts-based MIT. “Consumers are a lot smarter than we may give them credit for -- just because you’ve got a nice fake doesn’t mean you’re going to get away with it.”

Annual sales of counterfeit goods total about $600 billion worldwide, almost 7 percent of global trade, Gosline said in an unpublished research paper. That includes industries other than luxury goods, such as automotives, pharmaceuticals, media and consumer items, she said.

Counterfeiting costs U.S. businesses as much as $250 billion a year, according to the Washington-based International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition.

Conspicuous Consumption

Gosline’s research also supports the theory of conspicuous consumption -- that people will spend lavishly on goods to show off their wealth and social status. The study showed that people will pay twice as much for an item when they think they can use it to send cues about wealth and taste, she said.

Luxury-products sales may rise next year for the first time since 2007, consulting firm Bain & Co. estimated in October. Revenue in the 153 billion-euro ($230 billion) industry is forecast to increase 1 percent in 2010, excluding currency movements, according to Bain’s study. Revenue this year is likely to fall 8 percent, the firm said.

Still, fake luxury purses have a place on the social ladder. Many purchasers of knock-off bags move on to buy real ones within a few years, Gosline found in a separate study of 100 consumers.

“The counterfeit actually served as a placebo for brand attachment,” she said. “People were becoming increasingly attached to the real brand even though they never possessed it at all.”

From Fake to Real

Forty-six percent of the counterfeit-bag owners bought the authentic products within two and a half years, she said. Shoppers were willing to pay $786 for a real luxury bag, which declined to $403, on average, when they saw the items out of context displayed against a neutral background, Gosline found in the other study.

“People who look authentic to the brand -- high status people -- are far more able to get away with a fake than people who are not,” Gosline said. “A counterfeit is not necessarily going to do the same thing that a real brand will.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Meg Tirrell in New York at mtirrell@bloomberg.net.

posted by abi @ 11:36 AM