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General Background

Over the past century, luxury brands have been established their reputations and successfully convinced the consumers all over the world with their concepts. According to Virdict Research ( 2007), Europe, the largest luxury brands market will grow to $163bn by 2012 from $101bn in 2007. By 2012, Asia Pacific region will become the second largest market substitude for America when excluding Japan. The Middle East will be the second fastest growing market, behind Asia Pacific. The research also highlighted that when Japan is included, Asia Pacific will represent 36.2% of the tatal by 2012 compared with Europe’s 36.4% ( As the chart shows below, see ‘Global Luxury Retailing 2007’). The concept of luxury is reinterpreted from class to mass, from today’s luxuries to tomorrow’s necessities (Danziger, 2005). As the luxury market growing fast, even in these recession years, the importance of researching into this frield, expecially into what is the key factors for consumers to buy luxury goods is crucial to those companies.
 

Theories of Behavior and Motivation

There is no authorized definition of consumer behavior.According to Adam Smith (2003), the definition of luxury goods in his masterpiece work The Wealth of Nations is divided into two categories: necessities and luxuries. Necessities www.51lunwen.orgare those goods that keep the basic life of the lowest class, and the luxuries are those commodities not belong to the necessities. Then if the goods are not necessarily need in daily life, why consumers perchase luxuries?

Leibenstein (1950) pointed out three types of motivations: mass psychology, uniqueness and exclusiveness. People who hold mass psychology is eager to obtain the social value from the identification from the majority of people. People want to be unique, to be special, to have something to show off that could be used to differciate themselves from other people that demonstrate the extent of their power, status and richness. Danziger (2005) investigaed into the U.S. rich class and he classified luxury consumers as four categories: the butterfly-shaped purchasers, the isolated purchasers, the purchasers who pursuit of fame and status, the luxury-loving purchasers. Butterfly-shaped purchasers took luxury purchase as the way to trace a new meaning in the life, they bought the luxury as a gift for their life monument, they are not acturally pursuing of luxury; the isolated purchasers took luxury goods as a way of self-identification, they buy specific things as their expression which can expain thoughts; the purchasers who pursuit of fame and status looked on luxury goods as a symbol to express their appearance a本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。