Fashion Counterfeit Goods Buying Behavior: The Role Of Personality Characteristics And Purchasing Experience

The broadening scope and magnitude of counterfeiting nowadays has become one of the most troublesome problems during the process of internationalization. In particular, China, as one of the main counterfeit products source countries, begins to realize the important role that intellectual property plays in encouraging innovation and growth during current transition from traditional economy to knowledge-driven economy.After reviewing intellectual property law and marketing literatures, we carry out this study to investigate young and well-educated Chinese consumers' attitude and behavior with respect to the fake brand-name products in fashion and luxury industry in order to provide original brand owner effective suggestion for planning marketing strategies to combat the bogus branded dress and adornments. Data is collected through form of questionnaire sent by random sampling to graduate students studying either in domestic universities or in foreign ones.Responses from 49 interviewees indicate that the personality traits including self-monitoring, materialism value orientation as well as risk taking are respectively associated with different aspects of attitude towards fashion counterfeiting and the willingness to purchase fakes. In addition to the correlations and causal relationship among individual psychological and demographical characteristics and attitude as well as intention, we also find that the past consuming experience of counterfeit fashion goods impact the future purchase intention.Based on the empirical results and interpretation, we suggest that the legitimate fashion houses and designers take advantage of advertisements in accordance with the personality traits to convince the consumers that only the authentic genuine products are desirable, exclusive and risk-free, and are capable of impressing others and also expressing their self-image appropriately. More over, launching affordable bridge brands is also an effective strategy to appeal young consumer getting approach to their brands and to prevent them away from the fakes at the starting line. Finally, it would be better if the legal enterprises collaborate with law enforcement authority to educate citizens about the importance of intellectual property and let them learn that purchasing counterfeits is illegal, unethical and socially undesirable behavior. For sure, a crackdown on counterfeiting network will help authority to enhance the IP law enforcement.