Cutting your prices used to be virtual suicide for foreign brands in China — just ask Buick — but survey data from FT Confidential Research, a research service from the Financial Times, suggest that a savvier Chinese consumer is no longer willing to pay any price for luxury brands.
Demand for luxury goods has unsurprisingly weakened as economic growth has inched downwards and President Xi Jinping’s anti-graft campaign has shown no sign of letting up.
Gifting — often used to gain favour in business and government circles — has been scaled back, leaving many brands scrambling to recalibrate their product mix and pricing strategy to meet new patterns of demand.