Decoding the Chinese consumer

Nonetheless, Chinese buyers of items such as luxury goods have been something of a phenomenon.

Many top stores in European capitals employ Chinese-speaking staff and have even installed China UnionPay payment devices so Chinese can buy goods with their own domestic bank cards.

Tom Doctoroff, chief executive officer Greater China and North Asia Area director for advertising agency J. Walter Thompson, based in Shanghai, says the desire for luxury brands reflects the fact that Chinese consumers can be summed up as "ambitious".

"The Chinese are almost uniquely ambitious when it comes to buying luxury brands, even more so than the Japanese. They almost see such purchases as a declaration of intent and a down payment on their future," he says.

"It is not just young affluent professional people making such purchases but people who are still not making a lot of money."

An odd quirk of the China luxury goods market is that it is the only one in the world where men, and not women, make the most purchases despite the sometimes hysterical focus on Prada and Dolce & Gabbana handbags.

Doctoroff says this is because in China such goods are used as commercial gifts.

"Luxury is seen as a tool of trust lubrication and they are therefore exchanged as gifts," he says.

But Atsmon says it is wrong for outsiders to see luxury goods as a microcosm of the China consumer market.

"You might have some luxury jewelry brand selling, for example, that has three or four stores in London and each of them makes five sales to Chinese people in a day," he says.

"That might translate to 1,000 in a year. It might be a pretty big deal for the brand and grabs all the attention but those kind of numbers are small in comparison to what hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers are doing at home."

Doctoroff, who is also the author of What Chinese Want, Culture, Communism and China's Modern Consumer, argues there are fundamental differences between Chinese and Western consumers.

"In the West we are encouraged to define ourselves as individuals. In a Confucian society like China it is not like that. Individuals don't exist outside of their responsibilities to other people, whether it be their family or friends," he says.

He argues therefore that the motivations behind purchases are often different in China than in the West.

"If you take BMW, for example, it is positioned around the world as the ultimate driving machine which is all about the pleasure and thrill an individual will get out of the motion," he says.

"In China buying a BMW would be a reflection of your own power and a status symbol. How others see you rather than your individual pleasure."