Brand Groundedness in Luxury: Reconceptualising Place, People and the Past in Family-Owned Fashion Brands

Building on Eichinger et al.’s (2022) introduction of the concept of groundedness within a consumer context, this chapter explores its relevance and application in an organisational setting - specifically among family-owned luxury fashion brands. Using a qualitative research approach, the study draws on elite interviews with senior representatives from four luxury fashion brands, including CEOs, managing directors, and members of the founding families. The findings reveal key aspects of groundedness as they relate to place, people, and the past. However, recognising the contextual shift from the individual consumer to the organisational domain, this chapter reconceptualises these dimensions as locality, community, and provenance, respectively. These revised dimensions reflect how family-owned luxury brands articulate and embed groundedness within their brand identity and operations. By extending the groundedness construct from consumer experience to brand-level phenomena, this chapter contributes to academic discourse by highlighting how brand heritage, identity, and legitimacy are shaped by relational ties to locality (place), community (people), and provenance (the past).