Study On Affordable Luxury Clothes Brands Based On Consumers' Cognition Survey

In recent years,“affordable luxury” has been receiving wide popularity in the ever changing fashion circle.Consumers of the middle class selectively tend to trade up by choosing products that have relatively high quality,brand attraction and cost much less than traditional luxuries do.People,therefore witness a phenomenon completely different from the history: the democratization of luxuriousness and the democratization of luxuries.As a hot key word,“affordable lux” has been taken as an important content of brand strategies by many clothes brands.These brands are performing rather well under the circumstance that luxuries and Fast Moving Consumer Goods are suffering the off season--with considerable turnover and amazing expansion speed,these brands have drawn the attention of many scholars domestically and abroad.By taking clothes brands using the affordable luxury brand strategy as the study object,this paper carries out comprehensive research on the sources and development,categorizations,features and brand images of affordable luxury brands.By taking the brand image construction of costume brands as the theoretical basis,characteristics of affordable luxury clothes brands and results of the focus team interview are integrated to determine the brand image construction of affordable luxury clothes brands.Furthermore,through questionnaires,the consumer cognition about the image of these brands is measured along with analysis of the cognitive difference in affordable luxury clothes brands by different groups,thus summarizing the brand image characteristics of affordable luxury clothes brands.The following conclusions are made by the paper:1.Brand images of affordable luxury clothes brands can be divided into the visible image and invisible image.The former one is composed of five elements,namely,the price image,shop image,product image,customer image and propaganda image.The latter one is composed by four elements,namely,the consumers' motivation product use context,brand culture and fashionposition.2.There are more and more young consumers of affordable luxury brands especially in developed urban areas.Most of them have received higher education and have strong self-awareness.Their consumption motivation mostly sources from self-like self-enjoyment,expression of their own personalities,and other individual-oriented factors.The frequency of consumers buying affordable luxuries is mainly in the low-frequency area.The consumption amount varies from their personal income.Those with high income are more likely to conduct affordable luxury consumption in daily life.In terms of consumers' cognition,product design,product quality,and the competence of fashion leading are the most significant difference between domestic high-end brands and international affordable luxury brands.3.According to consumers' cognition,the first primary key word of affordable luxury clothes brands is the price,followed by the design,workmanship and quality of the product image.The brand image component with the highest score of visible brand image cognition is the customer image,followed by the shop image,propaganda image,product image and price image.4.Due to the difference in ages and regions,consumers' cognitive difference in affordable luxury clothes brands is huge,while the difference caused by income is insignificant.The cognitive different by people at different ages in affordable luxury clothes brands is mainly reflected in the price image cognition,customer image cognition,cognition of materials among product image elements,and cognition of advertising slogans and brand logos among propaganda image elements.The cognitive difference in affordable luxury clothes brands by people from different regions is mainly reflected in the shop image cognition,product image cognition and dissemination image cognition.The cognitive difference in affordable luxury clothes brands by people with different incomes is insignificant,but it is mainly reflected in the product image cognition.Causes for some other differences come down to other factors such as the age.As for the affordable luxury strategy making by brands,target consumers should be further categorized into the elder consumers with price and quality orientation and the younger consumers with style and individualism orientation,thus conducting targeted design or adjusting the brand image components.