Factors Influencing Purchase Intention Of Thai Consumers Towards Luxury Fashion Brands

The exposure of the western culture has become one of the remarkable situations in Thailand to focus on since it is more easily than previous era to adopt this culture,especially people in metropolitan district likes Bangkok.The international luxury fashion brands are appreciated and have been parts of the lifestyle of people in the capital.With this reason,the knowledge of luxury consumer’s behavior of Thai people is necessary to be studied as it is going to offer several contributions for related functions.The objective of this research is to examine the respective factors of luxury brand perception,traits of vanity,social influence,and purchase intention,and also the interrelationship between them in the context of luxury fashion brands by focusing on Thai consumers in Bangkok,Thailand.There are three main elements of factors that are studied in this research.The first element is luxury brand perception,which consists of three dimensions including functional value perception,experiential value perception,and symbolic value perception.The second element is traits of vanity,which can be categorized into physical vanity and achievement vanity.The last element is social influence.Therefore,all of these elements are divided into six individual variables including functional value perception,experiential value perception,symbolic value perception,physical vanity,achievement vanity,and social influence.Two research questions are set in order to clarify the perception and insight of Thai consumers.The questions are as follows:Research Question 1: Based on the six relevant motivations from the research conceptual framework,which factors are the main motivations that are perceived by Thai consumers as main motivational factors towards purchase intention of luxury fashion brands?Research Question 2: How do these factors,luxury brand perception,social influence,and trait of vanity,affect Thai consumer’s purchase intention towards luxury fashion brands?From the research questions 2,the hypotheses are constructed for testing the relationship between motivational factors and purchase intention in order to find weather there are associations between them or not? If yes,the directions go to the positive or negative side? Accordingly,all the motivational factors are teased as antecedents,and purchase intention is teased as dependent variable.The conceptual model is constructed based on Theory of Reasoned Action(Martin Fishbein and Icek Ajzen,1975)as this theory rationally describes the relationship between attitude and behavior by using the factors of belief attitude,behavioral intention,and expected behavior.However,the actual research framework is adapted only the relationship of attitude;luxury brand perception,and traits of vanity,and subjective norms;social influence,to behavioral intention.The explanations for the roles of all variables are as follows:Attitudes towards behavior: luxury brand perceptionThe first function,luxury brand perception,appears to most logically fall within the domain of attitudes towards luxury fashion brands consumption behavior since the general importance of the luxury brand perception has been highlighted as the significant component,which notably involves to decision of doing or non-doing a certain behavior.All three main perceptions of values,which are analyzed in this research,and additional explanation of all three values are as follows:The first factor is functional value perception,which is associated with the view of consumers on luxury goods that the goods can load utility to customers in terms of quality and capability of the products,which are superior to conventional products.The second factor is an experiential value perception.This determinant is the value that explains the perspective of the customers’ emotions and feelings when experience in using or consuming the brand name goods without any concernments of the characteristic of products’ quality.The final factor is the symbolic value perception,which is a view that customers see the luxury brand name products as a symbol,which can indicate the social status of users.Attitudes towards behavior: traits of vanityThe second factor relates to the consumption of luxury goods are the traits of vanity.The word “vanity” refers to the character of the person who is arrogant and self-importance of himself/herself because it is linked to one’s thought of oneself that have something better than others,which are appearance,look,shape or occupation.Moreover,traits of vanity can be described as a sense of pride in the appearance or achievement of their own.Traits of vanity can be divided into two types: physical vanity and achievement vanity.Physical vanity or appearance vanity,from the understanding of researcher,is known as a person with a sense of passion in the identity and look of its own.And it is believed that luxury goods can help them promote the physical characteristics of their own.Achievement vanity is an interest or passion for success and pride in the work due to high position in the society or workplace.People,who are in the group of achievement obsessions,have the belief that luxury brand name products are expensive ornaments that can indicate accomplishment on their jobs and can make them get respect.Subjective norm: social influenceThe final factor is social influence.According to past studies and researches,it is found that social influence can come from those around the person or possibly from a celebrity or influencer with a person’s ideal identity,which has been appreciated by most people in the society.With such of these factors,it might be the main reason why customers who highly concern on social value buy the luxury goods,especially,the customers in Thailand.Thai culture is a distinctive culture,which can be called as collectivism on which Thai people are more likely to hang out as a group and whatever they do they require to be accepted by society.The proposed hypotheses that are formed by inferring to the basic conceptual of Theory of Reasoned Action are as follows: Luxury brand perception and purchase intention H1: Luxury brand perception has a positive correlation with purchase intention.H1a: Functional value perception has a positive correlation with purchase intention.H1b: Experiential value perception has a positive correlation with purchase intention.H1c: Symbolic value perception has a positive correlation with purchase intention.Traits of vanity and purchase intention H2: Traits of vanity has a positive correlation with purchase intention.H2a: Physical vanity has a positive correlation with purchase intention.H2b: Achievement vanity has a positive correlation with purchase intention.Social influence and purchase intention H3: Social influence has a positive correlation with purchase intention.A self-administrative questionnaire with close-ended questions is constructed to test with 238 Thai respondents who live in Bangkok,and have purchased and,also,have awareness of the luxury fashion brands.The data collected by using online survey because this can limit research budget and help the respondents to complete the questionnaires quickly.The non-probability sampling method is adopted to test the hypotheses.There are three sections of the structure of the questionnaire,which is formed to collect the following data:Section 1: The respondents’ possession of authentic luxury fashion branded products to prove whether the respondents are the consumers of luxury fashion goods.Section 2: Demographic information of the respondentsSection 3: The scale measurements of the factors that influence respondent’s behavior towards purchase intention of luxury fashion brands.Then,the 118 sets of questionnaire are pre-tested by target respondents in order to check reliability and validity.The Exploratory Factor Analysis(EFA)is used to test the questions in order to check the factors’ internal reliability,which is validated at this stage.After that,the result of reliability analysis,which is conducted by calculation of Cronbach’s alpha,shows the satisfied outcomes.So,the questionnaires are released for gathering the data from target respondents.The finding of this research by using the descriptive statistics gives the answer for the Research Question 1 that the major motivations,which are perceived by Thai consumers in Bangkok regarding to luxury fashion brands are functional value perception,emotional value perception and symbolic value perception,which are all in the domain of luxury brand perception,however,this can not imply that these factors are really the main motivation towards purchase intention,so the inferential statistics is also conducted for answering Research Question 2.The second research question is deliberate analyzed in details on the collected data.There are two analysis tools that are used for solving this suspicion.First is the Pearson correlation,which is tested in order to examine the correlation and direction of correlation of all paired variables.Then,the Regression analysis is conducted as the second tool in order to analyze the hypotheses with the multiple variables and for confirming the outcomes of the correlation coefficients of each variable.All of these processes are performed by SPSS program.Both tools give the same results that all the motivational factors have positive correlation with purchase intention.In additions,the Regression analysis provides indepth information analysis,which indicates that traits of vanity,which consists of physical vanity combine with achievement vanity,is the factor with the highest rate of influence.By achievement vanity is seen to be more effective influencer than physical vanity.However,when capturing only each individual variable,social influence becomes the most effective motivational factor towards luxury fashion brands consumption.For the result of the impact of luxury brand perception on purchase intention,which also shows the positive correlation value,but with the smallest level of influence,especially for the functional value perception,which is the factor that is perceived by Thai consumers as the main attribute of luxury fashion brands.All the results lead to the suggestion for the related functions that it is crucial for todays world that the behavior of consumers is rapidly changed,understanding consumers only in the traditional sense is not enough since,sometimes,the basic perception does not reflect the real needs of the customers.Moreover,the finding of this research provides the beneficial recommendations to brand managers,marketing managers,and other key decision makers of luxury brands,who are going to do or plan to do business in Thailand that should design and apply marketing strategies with a key message about social value by integrating different communication tools for approaching consumers in order to increase the needs or awareness of high-end fashion brands and consequently with the positive effect on their processing of making decision to purchase luxury fashion brands.