Ethnic profiling of luxury goods consumers in southeast asia: new insights in international entrepreneurship approach

In the past two decades, more and more European firms, both multinationals and small or medium firms, have begun to concentrare their investments in the SOutheast Asia. This phenomenon has attracted substantial international business research attention (Knight and Cavusgil, 1996, 2004; McDougall et al., 1994, Oviatt and McDougall, 2005, Zahra and George, 2002) and encouraged the development of international entrepreneurship theory on the Southeast Asia as an important field of research (Bruton et al., 2008). In the extant international entrepreneurship (IE) literature focused on the Southeast Asia, special attention has been given to the performance of European companies there operating. In this respect, several variables have been proposed as strategic factors explaining the growth and the profitability of this type of companies really interested to invest a lot in Southeast Asia. However, to the best of our knowledge, there have not been clear theories that could help European companies to be successful inside Southeast Asia and this topic needs further study (Jones et al., 2011) Despite the growing prominence of emerging economy of Southeast Asia and the important role that entrepreneurship play in powering their economic growth, our understanding of international entrepreneurship in this country is quite limited. Consequently, a more systematic research approach is needed to improve our knowledge on entrepreneurial phenomena in SOuthAsia by European companies. Although IE research in general is focused on high-technology manufacturing sectors ( Coviello and Jones, 2004), this research has been realized mainly for the benefit of small and medium European luxury firms which need to separate the myths from reality when approaching the “Asian Eldorado”. Most of studies on SouthAsia are comparative explorative issues about start-up liability, entrepreneurial information seeking, policy or institutional aspects or venture capital industry management (Begley et al., 2005; Bala Subrahmanya, 2005; (Stewart et al., 2008). However in our perspective, while Asia is nowadays the biggest market for Western luxury brands, these studies ignorant that to exploit the huge potentialities of the Southeast Asian markets means, first of all, to acquire a decent knowledge about the religious and the cultural dimensions of the region. Differently from most of the Western industrialized countries, the mental processes of the Southeast Asian consumers are very much influenced by religious and cultural beliefs, most of them unknown to many European enterprises. This suggests that cultural and religious differences might impact significant aspects of the entrepreneurship process by luxury European companies in terms of access to resources, development of skills and capabilities and implementation of profitable investments strategy (De Clercq et al., 2010). We propose that a full account of differences among culture and religion among European and Asian context could improve our theoretical knowledge on the entrepreneurship activity in emerging country and provide practical strategies to managers interested in investing there. Massimo Ferdinandi wrote: “In theory, in order to accomplish his/her duties in the most effective way, a manager should be at the same time a lawyer and a psychologist, a tax consultant and a marketing executive, an anthropologist and a IT guy, a statistician and a theologian, a sales man and an organizer… At first sight, some of the just mentioned specializations, such as the ones of theologian and anthropologist, might appear unrelated to the manager’s job description, but it is not true!” Southeast Asian markets are a truly potential Eldorado for European luxury firms, but a poor knowledge of the above mentioned cultural and religious dynamics may quickly turn a great opportunity of success into a financial disaster. There are plenty of examples about the dramatic failures of European companies who underestimated the cultural and religious diversities and assigned their Asian internationalization duties to incompetent managers. This paper examines the religious and cultural factors which lie behind the phenomenon of Southeast Asia as the biggest world market for luxury goods and explores how luxury consumption practices differs between the West and Southeast Asia. Finally this paper analyses the triggering factors of the massive overseas luxury shopping of ethnic Chinese, the role of the man in the purchasing process of his female family components and the post purchase guilt