A Cross-Cultural Study Of Women’s Consumption Of Luxury Goods In China And Western Countries

With the development of economy, China has become the world’s second largestconsumer of luxury goods surpassing U.S..This research is an attempt to examine thecultural factors that lie behind this phenomenon, and based on distinctions betweenChinese and Western societies, explores how the women’s practice of luxuryconsumption differs in these two different cultures.Using Hofstede’s cultural dimensions and the concept of Confucian Face astheoretical underpinnings, the present study identified the ingrained influence ofcultural values on women’s luxury consumption behavior of Chinese consumers andWestern ones.The research design in this paper is quantitative complemented with qualitative.And the data were collected through questionnaires and face-to-face interviews, sincethe structured options as well as the7point Likert Scale with8questions inquestionnaire and face-to-face interview with the quantified and explicated questionswere included.With data analyzed by the SPSS software17.0, and the material from theinterviews, the five proposed hypotheses were testified. Additionally, the result of thestudy shows that, basically, the hypotheses were supported by the findings, whichproved that Chinese and Western cultures did have a strong influence on the luxuryconsumer behaviors. These lead to the final conclusion that in the realm of luxuryconsumer behaviors: Chinese women with a collectivism, high power distance andprofound Confucian Face values prefer the publicly visible goods and emphasis on thepublic meaning of their possessions; while the Western ones, with high individualismand low power distance would place a greater importance on hedonic experience andlay more stress on private meanings of their possession. The fact that there is verylittle difference between Western and Chinese samples regarding the individualismlevels, indicates that the cultural shift expected in China due to its opening to bothmedia and economy may be happening more quickly and more profoundly than many may have expected. The author hopes this thesis could have some implications for theresearch on the cultural orientation of the luxury consumption.