Planning the development strategy for the mobile communication package based on consumers’ choice preferences

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Abstract

This study aims to determine the services provided by TSPs for motivating the consumers to purchase new e-era mobile phones and find their corresponding functions of products, and to plan new e-era mobile phones based on customers’ attributes for satisfying the customer needs. This study uses four aspects (image of product, price of product, function of product and derived function of product) and 14 criteria to determine customer’s motivations of purchase and needs on new e-era mobile phones. We also combined AHP (Analytic hierarchy process) and FIM (Fuzzy integral method) with MCDM techniques to construct the value-created evaluation model for planning the new e-era mobile phones. This study selects 27 styles of 3G mobile phones already sold on the market, and uses the different customer’s attributes data to evaluate price’s satisfaction (product’s price) and value’s satisfaction (product’s image, product’s function and product’s derived function) for performance of these 3G mobile phones in a 2-axle evaluation map based on mass customization. This study shows three different customer’s attributes (male, female, both) to measure the satisfaction performance of 3G mobile phones in a 2-axle development strategy map using data from people that are surveyed randomly by 21–30 years old. The development strategy map will provide some new strategy view for developing new e-era mobile phone market based on value and price-satisfied portfolios.

Introduction

In the past, the manufacturers of mobile phones dominated the development of the mobile telephone market. As a result, the telecommunication service providers (TSPs) in purchase strength and subsidy policy divided the telecommunication markets into two different types of markets. Some TSPs will subsidize and promote well-known brands of mobile phones; therefore, their operation strategy is to adopt a series of mobile phones based on consumers’ preferences, and to provide the promotional mobile phones bundled with their service package through technology innovation. Other TSPs provide custom-made mobile phones, developed under the collaboration of manufacturers; therefore, their operation strategy is to develop a huge number of customized mobile phones based on the requirements of several different groups of consumers based on mass customization for reducing the production costs and for satisfying the customers’ needs.

Today, the third generation mobile telecommunication technologies are to promote the use of the internet through mobile phones in e-era. Therefore, the new e-era mobile phone not only comes with a telecommunication function but it also integrates many functions of data processing, multimedia play, image and video photographs and so on depended on the customers’ needs. The specifications and functions of the mobile phone generally evolved with the development of telecommunication technology. New e-era mobile phones not only follow the telecommunication agreements, but also include diverse functions and style designs. So it pushed the development of the mobile phone to move to lightweight, low power, and diverse functions that are fashionable and easy to use. Today, e-era mobile phones require diverse functions for satisfying the customers’ needs. Besides, the mobile phone manufacturers and telecommunications providers must ponder on how to find the customer’s needs for the next generation. We use a two dimensional (value and price) preference diagram to build the innovation strategy diagram of the mobile market.

Base on customers’ needs in preferences product information is to emphasize price, brand name, and quality. According to Vinson, Scott, and Lamont (1977), they found that product image will influence the customer aspiration, no matter what color, style, or quality of material. These characteristics can bring the reaction of image, impression and emotions, and these characteristics will influence the attraction of the product and customer impression of the brand name. The value-created from product image means the difference in social culture symbolization, product position of market, and preference of brand name. Therefore, if product price means some kinds of cost or expense, the customer will search to maximize product value in the limitation of the budget. Therefore, the source of value-created comes from the result which customers’ needs can be satisfied with product characters and functions (Woodruff, 1997). If the product or service can increase the utility/value with price and use period, then customers will purchase these products. So the new product will replace the old product by product functions, and the new product will push customers to adapt them by price strategy (Fishman & Rob, 2002). Some research analyzed the position of brands/products for mobile phone market by the preference map of multidimensional scaling method and influence-satisfaction matrix (Cha, Kim, & Lee, 2009). In order to satisfy customers’ heterogeneous needs and provide mass customization manufactures, some research made a lot of effort on the recommendation system of classification-based for personalization purchase of mobile phone (Lee and Kwon, 2008, Zhang and Jiao, 2007).

Based on above literatures the concepts of mass customization are considered in our paper. How can we create a new e-era mobile phone to achieve our aspired/desired levels for good fit in custom-made and for low cost in mass production to satisfy the customers’ needs? Therefore the mobile phone will become the mobile device of diverse functions for different group customers in custom-made. We can determine the customer’s needs and design portfolio through the investigation of different customers of characteristics/features. The study finds customers’ needs with four aspects (product image, product function, derivative function, and product price) and 14 other criteria. In this paper we propose an evaluation model for creating a new e-era mobile phone is built by combined the AHP (Analytic hierarchy process) and the FIM (Fuzzy integral Method) with MCDM techniques for finding the synthetic indexes and reducing gaps to achieve the aspired level. The research finds among criteria are not completely independent, some criteria (i.e. product design, product impression and product quality) of value-created aspects (i.e. .product image) are the multiplicative effect, and some criteria (i.e. internet service and store) of value-created aspect (i.e. product function) are the substitutive effect in real case. An empirical of 27 styles of 3G mobile phones is illustrated to demonstrate the value-created system of mobile phone market. Then our research results can help enterprise to understand the product competitive competences for mobile phone market.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, the value-created system of mobile phone market based on customer choice behavior is reviewed and discussed. In Section 3, an evaluation model for mobile phone market is proposed. In Section 4, an empirical study of mobile phone market for value-created is illustrated to demonstrate the proposed methods. Finally, conclusions and remarks are presented in Section 5.

Section snippets

Review on the package selection system of mobile communication package

Traditionally, since the information of product was lacked and the product function was more simplex, customers usually emphasized price, brand name, and quality (Rao and Monroe, 1989, Tomat, 2006, Tsao et al., 2006, Zeithaml, 1988). Recently, customers can easily obtain information about price, quality and function of products they would like to buy through the Internet etc. Therefore, the phenomenon pushes enterprises need to understand customers’ preferences in the diverse mobile phone

Building an evaluation model for mobile phone market

An evaluation model of mobile phone markets was built based on product innovation of function portfolio for satisfying the customers’ needs and providing the mass customization. The evaluation model includes three Sub-sections is shown in this section. In Sub-section 3.1 is the analysis of the purchasing motives and product functions of the mobile phone. The evaluation of the value-created system for the mobile phone markets is shown in the Sub-section 3.2. The evaluation method for criteria

An empirical study of the mobile phone market

We evaluates the value-satisfied and price-satisfied degree of 3G mobile phones, and analyze the location of 3G mobile phones by the development strategy map as shown in Fig. 1. Then the development strategy of the manufacturer of mobile phones and telecommunication can be found. Besides, we compare the satisfaction degree for some mobile phones with two methods, so the first method is to integrate the AHP and SAW methods. The second is to integrate the AHP and FIM methods. Then we show the

Conclusions

We analyzed the four aspects and fourteen criteria of mobile phone purchases. We found the aspect of product function to be more important than product image and derived function in young groups. Product image and derived function aspects of the male group are more important than the female group. The study compared two criteria relationships of the integrated AHP and SAW method and the integrated AHP and FIM method. We used the score evaluated model to evaluate the value and PS degree for nine

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