Mobile phones: Factors governing choice of models

Abstract

Over the past decade mobile phone industry has grown tremendously, especially in India with a market penetration of more than 400 million people. Given the population of India this number is expected to grow even further. Because of the fast paced nature of this industry and a new handset coming up every now and then, companies need to come up with innovative products that would appeal and stay with the general customers. The objective of this study was to find out the factors that the consumers look out for when they buy a new mobile phone for the first time or to replace the existing one. Initially we did some literature review on some of the existing papers that other had written and done research on. For a mobile phone, consumer preference for a mobile phones are sometimes linked to their lifestyles (Are consumers what they consume? By Hengyuan Zhu, Qing Wang, Ligang Yan and Guisheng Wu). The authors show in a large-scale field study that consumers can be segmented into four lifestyle clusters according to their preferences for different mobile charging attributes. In another paper, “Culture and design in emerging markets: the case of mobile phones in Russia” by Asta Salmi and Elmira Sharafutdinova, talks about the effects of interaction between old and new cultural influences, investigation the preference of consumers of a new type of product such as the mobile phone. The study showed that the general features (high power distance, femininity, high uncertainty avoidance) characterizing Russian culture affect preferred mobile phone design. In a paper, “Social reference group influence on mobile phone purchasing behaviour: a cross-nation comparative study” by Jiaqin Yang, Xihao He and Huei Lee, the authors tries to describe a comparative study investigating the influence of different reference group on consumer purchasing behaviour between the mobile phone users of USA and China. The study reveals that among the three reference group influence examined, only the utilitarian influence has resulted in statistically significant difference between China and US mobile phone buyers, and another two reference group influences, informational and value-expressive, have relative insignificant impacts. After the literature review, we went on to do in-depth interviews with staff members and students at the campus. From the interviews we found out the most of the respondents who were above middle age received their mobile phones as a gift from their sons or daughters and most of the respondents bought new ones because they had either lost it or it was old and broken. One of the interesting things that we found out from the interview was that most of the respondents didn’t have any attachment to any particular brands, except that they consider Nokia as a better brand compared to the other brands. Design was also considered an important factor by one of the respondents. He specifically mentioned that he made the purchase decision only because of the look and feel of the phone. This design can be either in the form of screen size such as full screen or form of the handset such as the regular rectangle phones or flip phones or slide phones. The next step after the interview, we listed out a list of attributes that we found out to be important based on the interviews; attributes such as brand name, style of the phone, screen size, camera and price. The method used to evaluate these attributes was conjoint analysis. Since conjoint analysis deals with products with different features, we thought that it would fit the aim of the study. After doing the conjoint analysis, of the five attributes, we found out that the most considered attribute of the respondents was the price of the mobile phone. Followed by camera, i.e. the respondents rated high on mobile phones with camera. Among the features the style of the phones was the rated the lowest.