Luxury brands targeting Chinese students in US
Print Edition
SELLERS of Western luxury brands eager to capitalize on the wealth of Chinese consumers are showering attention on mainland students in the United States.
The Los Angeles Beverly Center mall sends buses to pick up Chinese families at the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Southern California when parents drop off their children and at graduation.
“We aren’t just dabbling here,” said Susan Vance, the mall’s marketing and sponsorship director.
The mall sponsors Chinese student groups with roughly 45,000 members in what she called one of its most successful marketing plans.
Chinese shoppers account for 31 percent of the US$273 billion global personal luxury goods market, according to Bain and Co, and the United States is the biggest market outside of Asia.
It is not clear how much of overall luxury sales can be attributed to purchases by students, but some top brands clearly see the group as a financial force in its own right and as providing access to a much larger group of well-heeled shoppers — parents and family — making it an important new marketing channel.
Some 29 percent of high net-worth parents in China who send their children abroad for primary school and college choose US institutions, according to the Hurun Report, which publishes an annual list of China’s richest people.
California’s tourism bureau found that a majority of visits from China corresponded with back-to-school and graduation and that friends and family visited them often. Australia’s tourism agency found Chinese students in university are able to influence up to 14 trips from China during their years in school.
Chinese tourists and visitors have a long tradition of buying for friends and family to avoid taxes and fake goods. In Beijing, Fang Wen, whose daughter studies at Rice University in Houston, said she relies on her to bring back small goods including cosmetics, clothing and jewelry.
Companies selling top brands are recognizing that influence and reaching out to students.
In New York, Prada lured students into stores by offering vouchers for leather luggage tags worth about US$200, said Yun Chen, president of the Chinese Artist Alliance of New York City, an umbrella for Chinese student groups at four of the city’s top art schools.
Britain’s Mulberry Group set up a private sale with cocktails and desserts for students in the Chinese Artist Alliance at a store in Manhattan, inviting the first 100 buyers to a party for designer and model Cara Delevingne’s handbag collaboration with the brand, Yun said.
US brands have been and should be tapping this group, which comprise about a third of all international students in the US, said Angelito Tan, chief executive of RTG Consulting in China.
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