The Sweet Burden: Young consumers' extroversion, number of friendship on online social network and luxury consumption tendency

The purpose of this paper is to build a model consisting of young consumers' personality, the use of online social network, and the luxury consumption tendency. We collected data from users of a popular online social network site in China, renren.com, which is Facebook copy. Over 150 respondents from two leading Chinese universities, respectively located at Beijing and Shanghai, volunteered to participate in the survey. The results indicated that one's extroversion strongly predicted the number of fans on renren. Number of friendship was also strongly associated with his/her luxury consumption tendency, after controlled the gender, grade, disposable income, and frequency of internet use. Moreover, the participants' place of origin (big city vs. small town) served to moderate the relationship, i.e., for young consumers from small towns, their increased extroversion is associated with larger online social network, but at the cost of higher consumption of luxury goods, while the effect on undergraduates from big cities was lessened. These findings offer insight into the influence of consumers' personality on luxury consumption and provide managerial implications for marketers to build luxury businesses in China.