China has become the world's largest consumer of luxury goods. The noticeable market performance has led to many luxury companies establishing their presence in China and setting expectations for strong growth. In such a competitive environment, the companies that can build their reputation and compete against others in the Chinese market will be those who clearly understand Chinese culture.
Among the numerous factors that connect to the performance of business, design is playing an important part that cannot be ignored. However, although there are indeed much research of the Chinese luxury market, most of them are from the economic angle, seldom mention the design aspect. This project studies the design strategy of luxury products for Chinese market. It is based on the research on the current overall market situation of luxury product in China and application of Chinese culture in product design, in order to explore the appropriate design principles.
One popular and effective way to attract Chinese consumers is to design culture-relative goods, nevertheless, because Chinese culture is complex and subtle, foreign companies inevitably have some misunderstandings and some of their corresponding designs become confusing and undesirable. The phenomena and reasons of cultural misconception are studied in the thesis. Moreover, how to appropriately choose and utilize Chinese elements in luxury goods design is demonstrated here in detail with typical examples, since applying Chinese elements is the favorite and most frequently-used means in Chinese culture-relative design.
The objective of this project is to help luxury companies understand the Chinese market better and design suitable luxury products. Both Chinese and international companies can get useful information here for the future product development.