Ethical implications in business practices and consumers’ purchase decisions have been debated throughout the years and often differ across cultures. The research objectives of this study were to understand whether cultural indicators influence consumer attitudes towards counterfeiting. Which cultural factors/ indicators have an effect on attitudes and how strong are these indicators? In this study, moral intensity, materialism, subjective norm, ethnic identity, values, and belief systems were explored. Focus groups, one consisting of Canadian consumers and the other of Chinese consumers, were conducted to explore cultural indicators. A follow-up survey tested the relative strength of the cultural indicators: moral intensity, materialism, and subjective norm, within each of the two ethnic groups and the correlation of these indicators with attitude. Subjective norm had a significantly larger effect in the Chinese group than the Canadian group on attitudes towards counterfeit goods. Moral intensity and materialism did not significantly affect attitudes.

Chinese newly rich consumers have gained substantial power in the luxury sector through their conspicuous consumption. Chinese consumers’ lack of cultural capital and inexperience in the purchase and use of material commodities in the luxury consumption field has led many to associate their conspicuous consumption with pecuniary display of their newly acquired economic capital. Scholars have either used cultural globalisation theory to suggest that the Chinese consumers are embracing and emulating Western material culture, or have used Chinese face theory to explain their conspicuous consumption in terms of the social norms associated with Chinese family kinship and peer group pressure. This study attempts to look beyond both these assumptions, and for the first time seek a detailed and holistic understanding of Chinese newly rich consumers’ status consumption practices, particularly the relationships between personal taste and the social structure and cultural forces shaping individual taste in the consumption field struggle. Hence, the research question is “What status consumption practices do Chinese newly rich consumers engage in to compete for social distinction through luxury fashion consumption?” Bourdieu’s field analysis has been undertaken in order to enable a new understanding of Chinese newly rich consumers’ luxury consumption practices. The key concepts; cultural capital, habitus, and fields (Doxa and Illusio), have been discussed with respect to Chinese social conditions. Using luxury fashion as a potent example of conspicuous consumption, a qualitative study has been conducted among ten carefully selected Chinese newly rich consumers (Generation 1) residents of Beijing. Data analysis has shown that informants used two distinctive status consumption practices, namely, the materialist status consumption practice, and the cultural idealist status consumption practice (Holt, 1998), which are aligned with their social trajectory route, volume and the composition of their cultural capital. Informants’ cultural idealist status consumption practice indicated two important forms of cultural capital as social distinction: embodied cultural capital and ‘deterritorialized cultural capital’ (Üstüner & Holt, 2010). The embodied cultural capital has been accrued through early socialization, centered on intellectual cultivation and nonmaterialistic daily lives, whereas the ‘deterritorialized cultural capital’ has been accrued in a similar fashion to their Turkish high cultural capital (HCC) counterparts (Üstüner & Holt, 2010), through engagement with the West, despite only having this contact during adulthood, unlike the Turkish HCC. These two forms of cultural capital are centered on non-materialistic aesthetic driven consumption practices, which are similar to Bourdieu’s (1984) and Holt’s (1998) HCC consumers’ cultural idealist consumption practices. Thus, the thesis answers calls for more detailed analyses of consumption practices in Less Industrialised Countries. In doing so it both confirms the suitability of Bourdieu for the study of consumption practices in an Eastern context and provides new insights into the Chinese newly rich group’s consumption practices in the field of luxury fashion.

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This study's primary aim is to explain Urban Adult Chinese Consumers' preference between foreign and Chinese products. It examines how Country of Origin (COO), Consumer Ethnocentrism (CE) and Consumer Animosity (CA) influence Urban Adult Chinese Consumers' product preference and willingness to buy. The existing knowledge is divided on this issue. By reviewing the relevant literature, it is clear that there are two completely different approaches of investigating the impact of COO on Chinese consumers. The researcher of this current study classified the two opposing methods as 'the simplistic approach' and 'the cautious approach'. Studies follow 'the simplistic approach' firmly believe Chinese consumers overwhelmingly evaluate foreign products positively and they have a strong preference for foreign products. Research follows 'the cautious approach' argues that Chinese consumers' complexity and internal differences cannot be ignored, some of them prefer Chinese products and they cannot be simply considered as in favour of foreign products. Past studies all concluded that Chinese consumers hold low to moderate level of CE beliefs. However, two investigations concluded Chinese consumers harbour strong animosity towards the Japanese. This study follows the philosophical understanding of pragmatism. The research questions are the most important factors that determine the research strategy and quantitative and qualitative methods can complement each other to address the research problem. This study employs a concurrent embedded mixed methods research strategy that consists of a street survey and semi-structured interviews. Due to the distribution pattern of the quantitative data, this study used non-parametric analysis methods including: Chi-Square Test for Independence, Spearman's Rank Order Correlations, Mann-Whitney U test and Kruskal-Wallis Test. The qualitative section of the investigation focuses on four issues: how Urban Adult Chinese Consumers (UACC) determine whether a product is foreign or Chinese, sources and background of animosity, the impact of domestic alternatives and areas for Chinese products to improve. This study discovered that UACC's preference between foreign and Chinese products remain divided. They cannot be simply considered overwhelmingly in favour of foreign products or prefer Chinese products. For those UACC have a preference for foreign products, quality and design are the main two reasons. Desire to support China's domestic industry and patriotism are the main driving forces behind some UACC's preference of Chinese products. UACC holds low to moderate level of CE beliefs, which suggests they are worldminded consumers that capable of evaluate foreign products based on merits, without strong negative bias. UACC have strong animosity towards the Japanese, but antagonistic sentiments towards the Americans and French are relatively low. There are complex sources of animosity and this study identified a wide range of factors that contributed to UACC's strong animosity towards the Japanese. The main area of original contribution of this study concentrates on Consumer Animosity. It discovered a wide range of sources of animosity towards the Japanese and constructed an enhanced animosity model.

Brand avoidance is a new topic in consumer behavior research. The purpose of the study was to find the main driver(s) of the brand avoidance behavior among the Chinese mobile consumers. The study was based on the core framework of Lee, et al. (2009) and Knittel et al (2016). The study also applied Ma’s research (2012) to segment the Chinese mobile consumers. A survey was conducted based on the literatures. The findings show that Chinese mobile consumers do not share the same driver for the brand avoidance behavior, the main driver for fashion-taste consumers, trendy but cost-efficient consumers and conservative consumers is moral and identity avoidance. Rational and price-sensitive consumers avoid the brand because of the moral and identity avoidance, and the experiential avoidance for product. Business communication consumers avoid the brand because of the moral and identity avoidance and advertising avoidance. Organizations can use these findings to adjust their marketing strategies and content accordingly.

This study aims to examine the effects of animosity on consumers’ willingness to buy hybrid products (i.e. products that involve affiliations of two or more countries - such as branded in Japan but made in China). While consumers’ reluctance to purchase foreign products from countries that they have animosity towards is clearly evident in the current literature, little is known about consumers’ attitudes towards hybrid products. As such, the study introduces this new construct (i.e. willingness to buy hybrid products) to the animosity model to determine if animositic consumers would be more receptive or willing to accept hybrid products where the animositic tendencies towards foreign countries in question can be negated by the products’ domestic affiliations. To conduct this investigation, the study is undertaken in China where the Chinese consumers’ animosity towards the Japanese was examined. The data with a usable sample size of 435 were collected in the Chinese city of Nanjing. The findings of the study revealed that the high level of animosity present against the Japanese resulted in the Chinese consumers’ unwillingness to buy Japanese products. More importantly, results showed that the Chinese consumers are not any more receptive to hybrid products as such domestic affiliations have not diluted the animosity. Consistent with the literature, the study has also validated that consumer animosity to be a higher-order construct indicated by war and economic animosity. Under the conditions of extreme animosity, consumer ethnocentrism does not take a significant role in influencing other constructs in the animosity model.

Airbnb as one of examples of sharing accommodation is changing the way of travel. More and more consumers from all over the world are attracted to use the platform of Airbnb to book a local individual sharing house to access the authentic and unique local experience. Airbnb has also received attention from scholars recently, and they mainly focus on why consumers choose Airbnb. However, most of the studies have focused on European or American consumers, and there is less attention put on Chinses consumers. We aim to fill in this research gap in this thesis, and we develop a study on the motivation and constrain factors influencing the attitude of Chinese consumers toward Airbnb. Drawing inspiration from previous research (So, Oh and Min, 2018), we employ a mixed-method research design in this thesis to collect empirical data including semi-structure interview and questionnaire. We conduct an online survey with 316 respondents, and analyze it through SPSS. Our qualitative research confirms the 8 factors, price value, enjoyment, trust, insecurity, home benefit, authenticity, social interaction and perceived risk are factors to influence Chinese consumers’ attitude toward Airbnb. For the quantitative research, the first four factors mentioned above are tested as significant factors to influence Chinese consumers and the last four factors are tested as insignificant factors. Comparing with American and Canadian consumers studied by So et al. (2018), “price value” and “enjoyment” take significant influence both on American and Canadian consumers and Chinese consumers. Both the two groups are not influenced by “authenticity”, “social interaction” or “perceived risk” significantly. American and Canadian consumer concern “home benefit”, but Chinese consumers don’t. Insecurity significantly influences Chinese consumers, but not for American and Canadian consumers. Distrust significantly influences American and Canadian consumers, while trust motivate significantly Chinese consumers’ attitude.

As the digital society, built up by the internet, gradually changes people's lives, online celebrities are emerging in China and have discovered the huge business opportunities of online platforms by establishing their own brands. Many brands created by Chinese online celebrities are increasingly popular among consumers, such as Li Ziqi and Taozi Sister. Responding to the emergence and popularity of Chinese online celebrities and their brands, this study – drawing on the source-credibility model and the stimulus organism response model – will investigate the determinants of Chinese consumers’ purchase intention regarding online-celebrity brand products. Following a survey of 198 valid questionnaires of Chinese consumers, the empirical results show that the attractiveness of online-celebrity brand products and consumers’ affection for online celebrities are important factors in encouraging consumers to purchase online-celebrity brand products. The expertise of online-celebrity brand products, and consumers’ trust in online celebrities, do not significantly influence consumers' purchase intentions. This means that Chinese people's purchase behavior regarding online-celebrity brand products seems to be emotional rather than rational. This study advances understanding of online celebrity and online-celebrity brands, which contributes to the literature on celebrity effects and brands.

The luxury industry is one of the most powerful and solid industries of all times. In 2015, it surpassed €1 trillion in retail sales value, increasing year after year with a constant growth rate around 5% at constant exchange rates. However, the luxury goods market found a slowdown in its growth, national economies started to recover step by step after the 2008-09 economic crisis and the market keeps attracting wealthy Chinese tourist's. Indeed, they bought half of the luxury goods sold in 2015. The purpose of this thesis is to understand the Global personal luxury goods evolution over the years and the increasing role of Chinese consumers who fuel its continued growth. It provides an historical overview, summarizes the economic analysis of the industry, and includes a literature about the motivations of Chinese luxury purchases.

Background: Because of the high-speed development of e-commerce, online group          buying has become a new popular pattern of consumption for Chinese consumers. Previous research has studied online group-buying (OGB) purchase intention in some specific areas such as Taiwan, but in mainland China. Purpose:    The purpose of this study is to contribute to the Technology Acceptance Model, incorporating other potential driving factors to address how they influence Chinese consumers' online group-buying purchase intentions. Method:     The study uses two steps to achieve its purpose. The first step is that I use the focus group interview technique to collect primary data. The results combining the Technology Acceptance model help me propose hypotheses. The second step is that the questionnaire method is applied for empirical data collection. The constructs are validated with exploratory factor analysis and reliability analysis, and then the model is tested with Linear multiple regression.  Findings: The results have shown that the adapted research model has been successfully tested in this study. The seven factors (perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, price, e-trust, Word of Mouth, website quality and perceived risk) have significant effects on Chinese consumers' online group-buying purchase intentions. This study suggests that managers of group-buying websites need to design easy-to-use platform for users. Moreover, group-buying website companies need to propose some rules or regulations to protect consumers' rights. When conflicts occur, e-vendors can follow these rules to provide solutions that are reasonable and satisfying for consumers.