When Luxury Brands Meet Artificial Intelligence: How Brand Longevity Shapes Consumer Responses to AI‐Designed Products

ABSTRACT

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming branding, extending to core creative functions such as product design. This raises a broader question of when adopting a new technology coheres with a brand. This tension is most acute in the luxury sector, which is deeply symbolic and historically resistant to technology adoption. While some heritage‐rich luxury houses and emerging brands are experimenting with AI‐designed products, such adoption may pose strategic risks. For high‐longevity brands, whose identity is built on history, heritage, and symbolic continuity, AI's associations with automation and technological modernity can conflict with the brand schema consumers rely on. This research examines how brand longevity, operationalized through heritage‐related associations, impacts consumer evaluations of AI‐designed luxury products, drawing on four online experiments across fictitious and real brands, functional (technology) and emotional (fashion) product categories, and different countries. Results show that AI‐designed products from high‐longevity brands are perceived as a poor brand–AI fit, leading to lower brand authenticity, less favorable product attitudes, and reduced product prestige. Simulated behavioral contexts revealed that consumers were more likely to ignore and less likely to favor or seek more information about AI‐designed products from long‐lived brands. Individual AI attitudes moderate these effects. The research extends luxury branding theory by introducing brand longevity as a critical factor in AI integration in luxury product design and offers managerial guidance for balancing innovation with luxury brand longevity in AI adoption strategies.