Utilitarian Consumer Behaviour

With the advent of smartphones, the trend of mobile applications is one the upswing. Smartphone sales have seen phenomenal growth in recent years. This trend is highly likely to continue in future. Most of the people in the world still do not have access to smartphone. In 2015, only 17 percent of Indian population had smartphones. This indicates that there is huge opportunity for growth in smartphone sales. This is evident by the fact that apart from multi-national mobile device companies, there are home grown companies as well. These companies are giving multinational firms a run for their money. This huge market has recently attracted mobile device manufacturers from China. The smartphones made available by home grown companies such as Micromax,

This is not a new field of study, studies on rational and emotional contexts of consumption are being conducted since as early as 1950s, and many motivations have been proposed structuring into Hedonic and Utilitarian perspectives to identify the dimensions of the motivating factors behind shopping. Babin et al., (1994) described Utilitarian consumer behaviour as a rational approach involving purchases that are efficiently made, even if the shopping itself may not provide any fun, thus allowing the evaluation of shopping experience as an achievement of an intended goal. On the contrary, following the line of primary studies (Gardner and Levy, 1955; Levy, 1959; Tauber, 1972), Hirschman and Holbrook (1982) using the initial studies of (Gardner and Levy, 1955; Levy, 1959; Tauber, 1972), stressed on the concept of Hedonic consumption that involves multi-sensory and emotional aspects of a consumer’s experiences with the

There are certain features specific to mobile shopping for example small screen, limited data processing capabilities, ubiquity, type of mobile apps, different platforms. These unique characteristics provide an altogether different approach towards developing mobile services as well as these impact the needs and wants of the consumers as compared to other shopping channels for example in store , catalogue , pc online shopping.

Every consumer shops with different motivations thus resulting in formation of different shopping patterns hence it becomes necessary and also in the interest of the retailers to study and identify the motivations in using mobile shopping channel.

A hedonic shopper is an individual who falls into one of the following categories: Adventure, social, gratification, idea, role and