Co-creating sustainable luxury: how young consumers decode celebrity-endorsed sustainability through deep metaphor

Abstract

Incorporating sustainability into luxury remains a relatively new and complex endeavor. While often presented as a natural fit, this alignment does not always translate into consumer behavior, particularly in the luxury sector. This study aims to offer a fresh perspective by exploring how the younger generation, future drivers of both consumption and environmental impact, construct and interpret the meaning of celebrity-endorsed sustainable luxury communication, using the co-created luxury perspective as a theoretical lens. By integrating meaning transfer theory and consumer ambivalence theory and using the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET), this research seeks to uncover the symbolic and emotional processes underlying consumer sense-making, revealing how authenticity, aspiration and ethical tension interact in the co-creation of sustainable luxury value. This study uses the ZMET, which uncovers consumers’ cognitive and emotional responses via metaphorical imagery. The methodological approach follows a structured process working with images, storytelling and includes 20 in-depth interviews. This study’s findings provide a nuanced understanding of consumer reactions to celebrity driven advertising themes, revealing the complexity of perceptions surrounding luxury fashion and sustainability. While participants valued ethical progress, they also expressed persistent ambivalence, demanding coherence between symbolic storytelling and tangible corporate action. Celebrity endorsers were viewed as powerful but conditional mediators of credibility, effective only when perceived as authentic extensions of brand values. Ultimately, luxury was redefined not as material exclusivity, but as ethical balance, collective responsibility and emotional integrity. As an interpretive, ZMET-based study of 20 Millennial and Generation Z consumers responding to a single, researcher-constructed celebrity advertisement, the findings are transferable rather than statistically generalizable. Future research could examine other endorsers, product categories and cultural contexts and combine metaphor elicitation with quantitative validation. Credible sustainable-luxury communication depends on substantive authenticity rather than symbolic performance. Brands should embed ethical practice before storytelling, select endorsers whose values genuinely align with the brand, craft narratives that acknowledge rather than deny consumer ambivalence and pursue sustainability as a collective, industry-wide effort. By showing how credible celebrity-endorsed messaging can reframe luxury around ethical and ecological responsibility, this study suggests that luxury communication may serve as a cultural platform that encourages reflection on overconsumption and supports ethical-consumption awareness and education among younger generations. This study advances the literature on luxury branding and sustainability communication by offering an integrative, metaphor-based model of co-created meaning. This study uses ZMET methodology to examine how young consumers decode celebrity-endorsed sustainability messages in the context of luxury fashion, revealing the subconscious associations, emotional contradictions and symbolic realignments that underlie perceptions of ethical luxury. By framing luxury as a co-created and culturally mediated experience, this study extends existing theories demonstrating that authenticity and sustainability are negotiated collectively among brands, endorsers and consumers. This approach provides both theoretical innovation and practical insight, illustrating how luxury communication can evolve from performative sustainability to shared cultural transformation.