A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Business Administration

Research Studies Project Report (M.B.A.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 2019

Nowadays in China shopping on all kinds of online shopping platforms like Taobao and social media platforms like WeChat is quite popular, which provides great convenience for counterfeit luxury clothing sellers. Online counterfeit luxury clothing consumption is no small issue. The research aims to explore the attitudes of young people and their purchase intention towards online counterfeit luxury clothing consumption in the city Anshun, China. This research uses qualitative approach collecting data by online interviews on WeChat. The sampling approach is purposive sampling. We interviewed 20 young people aged from 18 to 25 in the city Anshun, China. Our research found that there are differences of attitudes towards counterfeit luxury clothing between young females and males. What is more, there exists a category difference. Young people are more tolerant of counterfeit luxury clothing than other luxury categories. For young females, we found that information susceptibility, product appearance, product quality, personal gratification, consumption concept, denial of responsibility, and denial of injury have strong relationship with their attitudes and purchase intention towards counterfeit luxury clothing while past experience and performance risk are less related. Some females who really care about service and status are found to care much about social risk. For young males, there exist differences in different life stages. Consumption concept, life stages, performance risk, and social risk are factors influencing young males' attitudes and purchase intention, among which life stages and social risk are quite important. Both females and males agree that online shopping platforms and social media platforms are a great contributing factor for counterfeit luxury clothing consumption. In a nutshell, young females hold a favourable attitude towards counterfeit luxury clothing while young males take an unfavourable attitude and most of them said they will not buy any counterfeits. The research proposes a model by combining the related factors of the models in the previous studies with some new factors popping up in the interview: consumption concept and life stages. It's found that for young females past experience, performance risk, and social risk are less related, which contradicts with the previous studies mentioned in the Literature Review. However, for young males performance risk and social risk are strongly related. We recommend that future research can {u2981}explore other categories; {u2981}expand to include other age groups; {u2981}take qualitative approach to explore other small cities and big cities; {u2981}continue to explore whether life stage is relevant for females; {u2981}focus more on online luxury counterfeiting under the new situation of new e- commerce law issuance in 2019.