Marketing Luxury Brands Across Asian Markets: An Investigation: of Consumer Luxury Value Perceptions in China, India, and Indonesia

摘要

Over the past decade, Asian economies have become a major growth sector for the luxury goods industry. Many luxury brands including LVMH, Gucci and Hermes have been highly successful in penetrating Asian markets. However, brands such as Prada and Mulberry have struggled to establish themselves in Asia (Butt and Roberts 2014; Osborn 2012). Analysts have ascribed the underperformance of luxury brands mainly to factors originating from the organization side such as over-expectations, and treating many Asian markets as homogenous (Financial Times 2014). How a luxury brand can profit from these rapidly growing and highly competitive markets represents an important question (Shukla 2012; Hennigs et al. 2013). Researchers have established that the attempts to explain the social behavior of consumers in one culture based on another culture would be inadequate due to differences in the psychology of consumption and value associations (Belk 1999; Sheth et al. 1991; Sharma 2010). With regards to Asian consumers and status consumption, the evidence on the underlying value perception that drives luxury consumption is largely anecdotal (Chadha and Husband 2005). As a consequence, the insights on the changing effects of value perceptions on consumers in different Asian markets are inconclusive, and are highlighted as a substantial research gap by several authors (e.g., Berthon et al. 2009; Hennigs et al. 2012; Shukla 2012; Wiedmann et al.2009).