Social Influences In Consumers’ Mobile Phone Switching Behavior Twenty-first Americas Conference on Information Systems, Puerto Rico, 2015 1 Social Influences in Consumers’ Mobile Phone Switching Behavior Full Papers Jussi Ilmari Nykänen Aalto University jussi.nykanen@aalto.fi Virpi Kristiina Tuunainen Aalto University virpi.tuunainen@aalto.fi Jouni Piispanen Aalto University jouni.piispanen@gtk.fi Tuure Tuunanen University of Jyväskylä tuure@tuunanen.fi Abstract Mobile phones have become a commodity and consumers switch their phones increasingly often. Earlier research suggests that social influences have a role in mobile phone switching, but the literature does not well explain what the underlying dynamics behind it are. We address this gap and report a longitudinal study on the social influences in consumers’ mobile phone switching behavior. Theoretically the paper is founded on switching behavior and more specifically on the push-pull-mooring framework that has been recently used to explain consumers’ switching behavior related to different products and services. Our mostly qualitative survey data was collected annually among Finnish university students during 2012-2014. While mobile phone users primarily base their switch decisions on rational reasons, indications of social influences on their switching behavior were discovered. Most interestingly, respondents seemed to recognize the role of social influences in their past behavior, but did not connect this to their future decisions. Keywords Mobile phones, consumers, switching behavior, longitudinal study Introduction Today Mobile phones can be considered as a consumable as the global penetration approaches 100%. Based on the ITU (2013) statistics the global mobile phone subscription penetration at the end of 2013 was about 6.8 billion, with the total world population of 7.1 billion. Mobile phones are rapidly replacing the traditional voice communication mobile phones, globally. Similarly to the 1990’s mobile phone revolution, we are not witnessing vivid smartphone saturation. The availability of the growing myriad of application software (apps) is a prerequisite for the smartphones to generate any value aside telephony services for a user. Apps can be downloaded to the mobile devices largely regardless of time and place. Due to the constantly increasing computational power, modern smartphones can perform several tasks that were just recently possible only for computers. Mobile technology increasingly brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by AIS Electronic Library (AISeL)