eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

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Why do people switch their mobile phones? What factors make them to stick with their current phones? This thesis' objective is to find out the influences behind consumer mobile phone switching behavior. Academic literature has examined mobile phone switching surprisingly little since the focus has been on mobile phone related adoption research. This thesis aims to fill that gap of lacking mobile phone switching behavior research.

An inductive approach is applied on a qualitative data set that was collected from 249 university students from three different continents to determine the consumer expressed reasons to switch and not to switch mobile phones. The results are organized based on consumer responses and examined in the light of PPM framework as well as mirrored to the established adoption literature such as the technology acceptance model and diffusion of innovations framework.

The findings suggest that mobile phones of any sort are increasingly switched to smartphones. The main reasons pushing people to switch mobile phones were identified as rational reasons such as dissatisfaction with reliability and advanced functionalities of the device being switched from along with external forced influences. The main reasons pulling towards attractive alternatives were identified as personal desires, advanced functionalities and subjectively perceived factors again along with external social influences. Additionally, brand influence and price value perceptions were pinpointed as pulling clearly towards smartphone adoption. The main elements preventing individuals from wanting to switch their mobile phones were determined as attachment to familiar advanced functionalities and subjectively perceived factors. In a general level, the pull effect is the strongest force leading to switching and the principal causes for this pull effect stem from associations to functional elements of the mobile phones.