| Abstract |
[Truncated abstract] Against a contextual backdrop of slowing growth in developed mobile service markets, the importance of youth as a growth segment, and youth's tendencies to consume mobile services hedonically, two research streams drove this dissertation. The first stream concerned extending the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) to predict youth's behavioural intentions to stay loyal to mobile service providers. Drawing on selfcategorisation theory, a conceptual model extended TPB by replacing subjective norm with group norm, a social influence from behaviourally relevant peers. With the extended TPB as the theoretical framework, the second stream investigated determinants of mobile loyalty intentions. Common to both streams, a key contribution of this dissertation was how hedonic consumption moderated the relationships among mobile loyalty intentions and their determinants. The dissertation addressed five questions in the two research streams, which to the author's knowledge no published studies have explored. Using a triangulation approach to address the research questions, a qualitative survey and literature review yielded six determinants of mobile loyalty intentions. Next, a pretest led to an improved questionnaire before a large-scale survey gathered data for empirical testing. The survey took place with Singaporean youth and yielded a cleaned sample of n = 415. ... For both low and high hedonic consumptions, customer value was insignificant. This might be due to Singapore's competitive mobile service market; youth perceived little differences in value for money among competing mobile service providers. Testing alternative models offered further insights into youth's mobile loyalty intentions. Youth's mobile loyalty behaviour, operationalised as past switching, was not stochastic, suggesting that mobile loyalty intentions contained underlying determinants. |
|
Brand trust, salient in other contexts, did not apply to mobile loyalty intentions perhaps because youth perceived little risk in switching mobile service providers in developed markets. An attitude-group norm interaction also did not relate to mobile loyalty intentions, supporting TPB's construct independence and parsimony. Finally, attitude and customer satisfaction were operationally similar in that they related to mobile loyalty intentions similarly. The dissertation concluded by offering academic and managerial implications and contributions, limitations, and future research areas. |
