The way consumers in China are shopping for luxury goods is changing amid the pandemic, with more purchases happening locally because of shelter-in-place protocols and travel restrictions.

Luxury spending in China accounts for a third of global spending. China’s growing wealth, style-conscious millennials, and policies and regulations designed to boost spending within the border pushed luxury spending higher in 2017. This report looks at where China’s consumers seek out information on luxury brands and what shopping channels they use.

Asia-Pacific is rapidly gaining, driven by China’s outsized population and outsized ecommerce participation, as well as by mature wealthy markets like South Korea (79.5% penetration), Australia (82.8%) and Japan (84.8%). Latin America, however, unexpectedly leapfrogged Central and Eastern Europe a couple of years ago and is now widening the gap.

The Global Media Intelligence Report is a concise yet detailed compilation of data and insights about internet users’ traditional and digital media usage in 42 key markets worldwide. This 2020 edition covers the same range of metrics we featured in 2019, and the consistency of GlobalWebIndex’s methodology enables us to offer precise year-over-year comparisons; these provide vital indicators of exactly where and how quickly changes are happening, and where behaviors haven’t altered much.

Like Hong Kong, Singapore is a small, densely populated and relatively affluent market where the dominance of digital media has been consolidated. Smartphones are the leading digital device in Singapore and continue to increase their lead over PCs. According to GlobalWebIndex, 98.3% of internet users ages 16 to 64 owned an advanced handset in H1 2019, compared with 78.1% who owned a desktop or laptop.

The fashion industry, in its current state, is not environmentally sustainable. For this reason, companies have begun implementing circular business initiatives in attempts to appeal to conscious consumers and cut back on their carbon footprint. But a new study shows that these models may benefit only higher-priced players, leaving value markets in the dust.

Online grocery is a massive and fast-growing market. We estimate that grocery ecommerce in the US—specifically online food and beverage sales—will grow 18.2% to $19.89 billion in 2019 and will rank as the fastest-growing product category online.

Amazon and Alibaba continue to expand into Western Europe—Amazon with hopes of capturing a greater European consumer base, and Alibaba selling luxury European goods to its tens of millions of consumers in China.

That said, affluents were much more likely to own any of these items. Ownership of smart TVs is approaching 50%. But age is a major determinant in the uptake of digital entertainment. Smart TV ownership has already passed the halfway mark among males, and all but the least affluent internet users.

The first is a short survey offered via mobile; it contains a key set of 50 questions and reaches mobile-only respondents (who tend to be younger, less affluent and concentrated in emerging markets).

That was a theme of an October 2019 report by Boston Consulting Group and Vestiaire Collective, the latter a player in luxury-apparel resale. The report said second hand is becoming “one of the fastest-growing areas of luxury,” with fully half of all luxury customers participating in the resale market.

Consumers in China spent $118.39 billion on luxury goods in 2017, far more than consumers in the US, Europe, Japan or the rest of the world.

And while the Australian market and the US market are quite different in the makeup, certain things hold true across both markets. We have a longer lead time for the new things we do, which is a bit of a luxury in comparison with Uber Eats. But [there are, nonetheless, times when] we have to act quickly. What have you learned these past few months based on the data and insights you’ve collected?

As the coronavirus spread in the first half of 2020, we might have expected radical changes in the media behavior of consumers around the world. But for the most part, that didn’t happen. That’s just one insight to emerge from eMarketer’s newly released 2020 Global Media Intelligence (GMI) Report, a detailed look at internet users’ engagement with digital and traditional media in 42 major markets, produced in collaboration with Starcom Worldwide and GlobalWebIndex.

In India, the young and the affluent are rapidly adopting smartphones and enthusiastically increasing internet and digital video time, but time spent with traditional TV is still growing.

Luxury retailers are embracing SMS differently. Norman Guadagno, CMO of marketing technology solutions provider Acoustic, cited the example of a salesperson at Louis Vuitton taking a customer’s phone number after a purchase to follow up with a text containing a link to a webpage with a curated set of goods they might be interested in.

Luxury is fundamental to Chinese consumers' aspirations

Even the more aspirational consumers find that tapping into the resale market allows them to afford luxury brands on the front end and get value for them on the back end when they’re ready to move on from a purchase. With expectations of a recession, the resale market should be able to accelerate as more consumers look for budget-friendly alternatives to their discretionary purchases.

One reason for this relatively low figure is that advanced feature phones were introduced to the Japanese market early and enjoyed substantial takeup. Desktop/laptop ownership declined between H1 2019 and H1 2020, from 75.6% to 74.3%, and is mostly concentrated among older individuals.

Subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services like Netflix are gradually increasing their market presence. In H1 2020, 61.2% of internet users polled had used SVOD to watch TV programs, films, or other video content in the previous month.

The first is a short survey offered via mobile; it contains a key set of 50 questions and reaches mobile-only respondents (who tend to be younger, less affluent and concentrated in emerging markets).

Auto advertising in Germany aims high—both in terms of spending and the sophistication of the market. Affluents are the target, and gaining their attention requires high production values. And that requires a commitment to larger ad budgets. As digital video continues to make inroads, the automotive industry, is poised to spend more in this channel.

As in many other markets, live TV viewing in Belgium was most common among older cohorts in the survey (ages 45 to 64) and among more affluent individuals. By contrast, VOD correlated strongly with age, with usage ranging from 91.1% of respondents 16 to 24 to just 50.5% among those 55 to 64. Newer technologies and devices have seen lackluster uptake.