The Chinese market has played an important role for the luxury industry in the past years, with double-digit yearly growth (except for last year). Luxury brands have tried to design strategies to meet the local requirements, be it in terms of retail formats or communication strategies. However, Chinese luxury consumers are evolving in terms of consumption habits and materialistic value: observations from the field show that there is less and less emphasis on logo display among certain consumers (Dubois & Laurent, 1994; Lin & Wang, 2010). Such changes might affect also young consumers, which already stand for a great share of luxury consumers (Source: Red Luxury,2012). Besides, past studies on Chinese consumers’ attitudes toward luxury and values behind luxury consumption have often relied on student-samples, acknowledging the potential limitation to their results due to a potential lack of representativeness of the population interviewed. Few studies have provided analyses of the causes of the values and behaviours of young Chinese customers towards luxury product consumption, focused on them as ‘young people’ (Wang et al., 2012; Xue & Wang, 2012). Besides, most of those that tried to do so relied upon student samples of Chinese students studying abroad (in the USA or Europe) (Chen & Kim, 2013).

This paper attempts to investigate the contemporary young Chinese consumers’ behaviour towards luxury consumption, segmenting them into two groups : the international student group and mainland Chinese young consumer group. A quantitative survey collected data from 104 respondents within a month where the snowball sampling method was applied to broadcast both online and offline questionnaires. Qualitative data was analyzed through lexical analyzis, while quantitative data was analyzed with the help of SPSS (Levene-test and T-tests).

This study mainly focuses on four features: Chinese culture, materialism, young Chinese generation culture and buying motivation. The results of the study mainly indicate that there have been some changes between generations. One such change is that Chinese youths are more individualistic than what was found in previous studies, and another change is that young Chinese consumers hold different points of view towards the values of luxury consumption.
As far as differences between international students and local young people from Mainland China are concerned, we found the following differences:
• Finding 1: International students purchase luxury products to fit-in with their friends & because they want others to view them as a member of the upper class & as a successful person more than their local fellows.
• Finding 2: International students’ income is more able to support them purchase luxury products than for young locals, and they are more inclined to save money to buy luxury products that their local fellows.
• Finding 3: Mainland Chinese young people usually go luxury shopping with their parents more than international students do and claim they will still purchase luxury products even if prices increase more than them as well.
• Find 4: Purchasing luxury products make local young people happier than international students, and they care more about the style (as opposed to price) of luxury products than these lasts.
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We believe such findings will help luxury companies refine their strategies for the coming generations and help researchers notice on which dimensions of luxury consumption using expatriated Chinese students might have an impact and lead towards biased results.

• Anne-Flore Maman Larraufie(SémioConsult)
• Lu Wang(ISC)
• Nathalie Veg-Sala(Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense)