The Influence Of Geographic Mobility Characteristics On Consumers' Mobile Internet Usage

The whole world has been witnessing an explosive growth in mobile Internet use.Mobile Internet has penetrating into people's everyday life and has been changing consumers' preference and usage behavior.It not only creates many new products and services that satisfy consumers' needs and wants,but also leads many traditional services on the PC Internet to migrate to the mobile contexts.The adopting and utilizing of mobile media has also change the interactions between consumers and companies and makes mobile media important marketing channels.However,the understanding of consumer behavior in the mobile Internet context suffers several limitations.First,extant literature has largely discussed the overall characteristics of mobile Internet compared to other channels like PC Internet,and physical channels,but lacks of investigation of its specific characteristics.Second,most of the literature did not examine the influence of switching physical environment on consumer behavior from a dynamic perspective.The Third,although geographical characteristics are prominent in the mobile Internet context,and social interaction activities are naturally connected with mobile Internet usage,little literature has discussed how consumers' activities in the physical world affect their social interactions in the virtual world.In light of these research gaps,this research analyzes the unique characteristics of mobile Internet relative to PC Internet and reviews extensive literature on mobile Internet marketing,location marketing,and mobility,and then investigates the influence of geographical mobility on consumers' mobile Internet usage.Specifically,this research investigates how mobility characteristics affect the use of strong tie social media applications(SMAs)versus weak tie SMAs.The research also investigates the moderating role of social temporal order on the above mentioned relationships.Based on mobility literature,we identify three characteristics of geographical mobility,that is,movement intensity,movement disorderness,and movement fragmentation,that reflect the overall travel patterns of consumers.Movement intensity reflects the extent of geographical mobility,or the size of movement in the activity space.Movement disordcmess reflects the spatial structural feature of geographical mobility.It describes the irregularity or the heterogeneity of activity space.Movement fragmentation reflects the temporal structural feature geographical mobility.It describes the separation of activities into discrete pieces.With regard to mobile Internet Usage,the research not only investigate the overall mobile Internet usage,but also the specific mobile Internet usage.Based on the strength of relational ties established in different social media networks(SMNs),We categorize social media applications into strong tie SMAs and weak tie SMAs.Strong tie SMAs differ from weak tie SMAs in many ways.First,the number of ties one can maintained in a weak tie SMN is larger than that in a strong tie SMN.Second,strong tie SMAs facilitate information transfer and absorption,whereas weak tie SMAs are advantageous to searching information.The third,strong ties helps to build trust and therefore social norms such as reciprocity exerts larger influence on the members in a strong tie SMN than in a weak tie SMN.Social temporal order reflects how activities vary in different time slots due to social arrangement.The research investigates the moderating role of one specific social temporal order,that is,weekdays versus weekends.The data used in the empirical study were obtained from one of the provincial operating subsidiaries of a leading telecommunications services provider in China.At the end of year 2015,the subsidiary had more than 20 million subscribers which accounted for 78.43%of the whole telecommunication market share in the focal province.We randomly drew a sample consisting of approximate 100,000 subscribers from the whole customer base of the subsidiary,and collected individual user based data for four weeks(from Nov 23,2015 to Dec 20,2015).We measured each subscriber's media social media usage based on the daily amount of bytes consumed by social media applications.We aggregated the amount of bytes consumed by the sessions that visited strong tie(or weak tie)social media applications to form daily strong tie(or weak tie)SMA usage.The dependent variable was measured by the percent of strong tie SMA usage to total SMA usage.The intensity of geographical mobility was calculated as the number of sequential mobile base towers visited by the subscribers'smart phone in one day.The disorderliness of mobility was measured by the movement entropy.Fragmentation of mobility were calculated as the average duration around each mobile base tower along the subscribers' moving trajectory in a specific day.We modeled the subscribers' two-step decision-making process with regard to the usage of mobile Internet.We established and estimated a RE dynamic probit model to describe subscribers' decision to initiate mobile Internet sessions.We established and estimated a first-differencing fixed effect model to describe the subscribers' mobile Internet usages.The findings indicate that movement intensity and movement entropy have positive impacts on mobile Internet usages,whereas movement fragmentation has a negative impact on mobile Internet usages.The influences of mobility characteristics on strong tie and weak tie SMA usage may vary depending on social temporal order.The contributions of the research are:(1)it provides insights into consumer behavior in the mobile Internet by investigate specific characteristics of geographical factors;(2)it links mobility in the physical world with the social interaction in the virtual world,and therefore,proposes new factors that affect social interactions;(3)it enrich geographical factors that affect mobile Internet usage by identify the spatial structure and temporal structure characteristics of geographical mobility.The research findings also provide managerial implications for companies to manage their mobile Internet customers,to design their mobile applications,and to implement their mobile adverting strategies.