Friday 14 May 2010

China’s Consumers Prefer Established Brands – 14/5/10


Hold Off Being Bullish On China’s Luxury Market’ says an article in The Wall Street Journal, which is based on a report just released by KPMG on the Chinese wealthy consumer.

A key point of the article was that Hugh Devlin, a luxury branding consultant, said that China's luxury market will catch up with the West very fast, but is "still relatively immature." He also suggested that “Western brands that look to China as a dumping ground for last season's products will likely not be successful.”

Another interesting finding from the KPMG survey was that “three-quarters of respondents said the financial downturn had little impact on them, while almost half said they expect their spending on luxury goods to be unchanged or to go up." Great news, breath out... particularly as most of the recently released luxury first-quarter revenue and profit figures have maintained continuing positive growth in China.

However, we suppose the luxury brands should not put all their pave wontons into the wok at once… The successful brands are the recognised brands, generally with a heritage or those that have invested years ago in China. New brand entrants have a harder act to follow and need to be informed as to the consumer tastes and how they like to be talked to.

Image credit: luxuo.com

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1 comment:

Jing Daily said...

While established brands are the ones that are successful now, I think Hugh Devlin's prediction that the consumer market will mature quickly will aid new brand entrants.

Particularly as the big brands become ubiquitous and less desirable, consumers will become sophisticated and educate themselves about both new and established luxury brands.

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