A Comparative Study Of Future Consumption Motivation Toward Luxury Goods Between Chinese And Italian College Students

In the past several decades, experts and scholars in China and all over the world conducted a lot of in-depth research about consumer behavior of luxury goods. Now luxury consumption motivations generally become one important branch of luxury consumer behaviors. In nowadays luxury consumption boom, the research which studies college students came into people’s mind and it is really important to study these young people’s consumer minds toward luxury goods. Among these studies, the study of comparing the consumer motivations of college students toward luxury goods between China and western countries is the most necessary and significant.After a delicate literature review and an introduction of Chinese and Italian college students’ consumer characteristics, this paper presents seven major luxury consumer motivations in two general consumer motivations:social motivations (include conspicuous, bandwagon and social contact motivation) and personal motivations (include perfectionist, hedonist, self-gift giving and self-expression motivation). With the help of questionnaire, this paper finds that bandwagon motivations, social contact motivation of Chinese college students are more significant than Italian students. Perfectionist motivation of Italian college students is more noticeable than Chinese college students. For the rest four motivations there is no significant difference between Chinese and Italian college students. Both Chinese and Italian students focus on personal motivations and this is the most significant difference compared to previous research.This study also provided a method for profound study on consumer behavior research toward luxury goods and gives some practical suggestions to luxury companies.