Brand Loyalty, Purchasing Behaviour, and Cross-Attribute Variance for Smartphones - Dissertation Example

In recent times, the advent of the latest technologies has completely revolutionized the mobile phone manufacturing industry, marketer’s perception regarding the use of mobile phones as a potential marketing tool, and most importantly consumer’s perception about mobile phone applications (Wei and Lo, 2006). According to Wei and Lo (2006), mobile phones manufacturers have transformed the mobile phone from being a device for communication to a device that is capable of virtual mobility, able to personalize social interaction, and able to offer multiple applications which can help customers to perform their task in a more responsive and customized manner.

From the technological perspective, a transformed version of mobile phones which is basically a multimedia machine is known as smartphones. Wei and Lo (2006) raised questions over the usage of the term “Smart” in defining artificial intelligence and the programmability of smartphones. However, Smartphone is common jargon that is used to classify mobile phones that have multiple customizable applications and can be used to help persons in their daily life. Smura, Kivi, and Toyli (2009) defined Smartphone as the combination of personal device assistants (PDA), augmented virtual reality, and traditional mobile phone technology which provides benefits like a global positioning system (GPS), downloading applications, WiFi, entertainment, etc.

With the help of smartphones, customers can be connected to the internet on constant occasions, customers can download multiple applications and customers can even enjoy multiple complex functionalities with the help of a strong operating system (OS) of the phone. Careful analysis of the research work of Smura, Kivi, and Toyli (2009) reveals the fact that demand for Smartphone applications is increasing due to changes in the lifestyle of people. As the work pressure and professional expectation have been increased in recent times hence people are looking for a customized application which can not only help them in work but also save them to perform tasks in less time.

Such shifting of lifestyle has influenced mobile manufacturers such as Apple, Samsung, Nokia, HTC, and others to advent more customization and sophistication in their Smartphone offering. That is the reason why smartphones like Apple iPhone 5, Galaxy S4, Nokia Lumia 920, HTC One X, etc are keep getting upgraded at periodic intervals. These smartphones are able to transfer more data than any of the traditional mobile devices and this is the reason why the demand for smartphones is keeping increasing.

Suki and Suki (2007) pointed out that customers do not perceive smartphones just as mere intercommunication devices but perceive it as the device which can help them to improve social participation, extend interpersonal networks with the help of social networks and help them to download multifarious fun applications. Shin (2012) rightly argued that consumer behavior towards smartphones is changing rapidly and many customers have started perceived Smartphones as a status symbol. Park and Chen (2007) forecasted that demand for smartphones will increase threefold in the next 10 years and part of their assumption has already become true.

In such context, companies like Apple, Microsoft, Nokia, and Google are developing operating systems (OS) such as Android, Windows Mobile, iPhone OS, Symbian OS in order to improve the performance of smartphones.