CENTRE FOR MANAGEMENT STUDIES

JAMIA MILLIA ISLAMIA

PhD Proposal
ADOPTION OF NEW TECHNOLOGIES BY COMPANIES
AND ITS IMPACT ON CONSUMER BEHAVIOR
A Study of Mobile Manufacturing Companies In India

Submitted By:
TAHIR AHMAD WANI

Marketing/Consumer Behavior

Contents

1. Introduction & Rationale of Study

Page No
3

2. Review of Literature

3. Research Objective

4. Hypothesis

5. Scope of the Study

4. Research Methodology

5. Tentative Chapter Scheme

10

6. References / Bibliography

11

Introduction & Rationale of Study

As defined by Hoyer et al (2008), consumer behavior reflects the totality of consumers

decisions with respect to the acquisition, consumption and dispositions of goods, services,
activities and ideas by (human) decision making units (over time). M. Khan (2007) indicates
that consumer behavior can essentially be defined as the decision-making process and physical
activity involved in acquiring, evaluating, using and disposing of goods and services. Both
these definitions view buying behavior as a set of processes one after another. Thus customer
behavior involves the thoughts and feelings experience and the actions customers perform in
consumption processes. It also includes all the things in the environment that influence these
thoughts feelings and actions. These include comments from other customers, advertisements,
price information, packaging, product appearance and many others. It is important to recognize
from these definitions that consumer behavior is dynamic, involves interactions, and involves
exchanges. Consumer behavior is dynamic because the thinking, feeling and actions of
individual consumers, targeted consumer groups and society at large are constantly changing.
Fast development of equipment and technologies, economic globalization and many other
external circumstances stimulate the changes in consumer behavior. Usually consumer behavior
has drawn upon theories developed in related fields of study of human behavior such as
psychology, sociology, economics, behavioral economics, and anthropology, to develop a
theoretical framework for the analysis of the behavior of consumers. It is widely accepted that
by 2050, if current population and consumption trends continue, increased demand in resources
shall require 2.5 planets to support the population with what it shall need. To create more
sustainable consumption, businesses must reshape demand by making it more personal and
relevant to consumers and leveraging the power of technology to drive engagement and
transparency.
But in todays world the challenge is not the lack of core technology, which continues to
develop apace, but the need to transform consumer behavior. Many researches have pointed out
that many times consumers fail to absorb the new technologies or fear that it might get outdated
soon, thus never use the same.
Development of a new product every new month has created confusion in the minds of

customer like should he postpone the buy or should he never purchase a product that shall be
outdated in a months time. Even though many of the researchers have tried to link the behavior
of customers with rapid technological adoptions by the companies yet much more of the work
is to be done.
Rapid adoption of technology is prevalent in almost all industries. The present study shall
focus on Mobile Phone Manufacturing Companies. The research shall try to fill the gap in the
existing literature. The research shall contribute to better understanding of the factors that
influences consumer behavior in electronic environment especially telecommunication
environment. There is lot of potential for further analysis of consumer behavior. Therefore the
research shall be important to develop new methods and techniques for evaluation of consumer
behavior in e-environment.

Review of Literature

There is a lot of researches done by international experts and students on topic how and
why people adopt to a new technology. The researchers are devoted to two important levels
organizations and individuals. ElinaGaile-Sarkane (2009) provides an exhaustive description
of the studies in the area of technology adoption. According to the authors point of view the
results of her survey confirm that consumer behavior is changing under the impact of new
technologies and especially under the impact of the internet and e-commerce. Davis, Fred D.
(1989) also tried to establish relationships between customer perceptions and acceptance of
changing Information and technology. He used the factors like usefulness-usage and use-usage
and tried to study their relations when customer perceptions when adapting to a new innovation.
Tao Zhang, (2011) suggested a new model to model the effects of user learning on
forcedinnovation diffusion. He argues that in innovation diffusion processes the decisions of
whether to adopt the innovation can either be made by the actual users freely and implemented
voluntarily, or be made by few authoritative individuals and implemented enforcedly. He
suggests that the model proposed can be used to study the relationship of buyer behavior with
adoption of innovations.

Many TechnologyAdoption Models (TAMs) have been suggested so far.Davis, Fred D.

(1989) was the pioneer of Technology Adoption Models. The maingoal of technology
acceptance theory is, to explore the factors that influencethe adoption and diffusion of new
technologies throughout a social system Barnes, S.J., Huff, S. L. (2003). TAM was specifically
designed to model user acceptance inInformation Systems. Davis Technology Acceptance
Model (Davis, 1989) predicts information technology acceptance and usage. In this model the
users behavioral intention to use a technology is affected by their perceived usefulness and
perceived ease of use of the technology. The Technology Acceptance Model constitutes a solid
framework for identifying issues that may affect user acceptance of technical solutions. As
Davis andVenkatesh (2004) have proved, the model can be enhanced from the original purpose
ofstudying user acceptance of existing products to study planned product concepts, e.g. in the
form of mock-ups. This indicates that Technology Acceptance Model (see Figure1) could also
be used in connection with technology development projects and processes to assess the
usefulness of proposed solutions. Applied in this way, the model also supports the humancentered design approach. The Model was modified by EijaKaasinen (2005), to study the
relationship between user acceptances towards the changing mobile internet services

Figure 1 Technology Acceptance Model for Mobile Services (Kaasinen, 2005)

According to the model, user acceptance of mobile services is built on three factors: perceived
value of the service, perceived ease of use, and trust. And a fourth user acceptance factor:
perceived ease of adoption is suggested to get the users from intention to use to actual usage.
There are a lot of other theories that describe different factors what influences consumer
behavior and adoption of information technologies. For example, as most important
determinants that affect consumer behavior are (Vanketesh, Moore, 2003):
The degree to which an individual believes that using the system shall help him or her to
attain gains in job performance or performance expectancy;

The degree of ease associated with the use of the system or effort expectancy;

The degree to which an individual perceives that important others believe he or she
should use the new system or social influence;

The degree to which an individual believes that an organizational and technical

infrastructure exists to support use of the system or conditions.

ElinaGaile-Sarkane (2009) Existing models of new technology adoption very welldescribe

all aspects of consumer behavior and points out specific features to what companies should pay
attention on. New technology adoption models could be applied to web technologies and ecommerce. Thereby, by knowing both adoption models and particularities of consumer
behavior they can be used for:

Development of technology development and adoption plan;

Analysis and control of technology adoption process;
Escaping of mistakes;
Modeling of consumer behavior;
For development of methodologies and methods, etc.

Denisseulovs,

ElinaGaile-Sarkane

(2012)

also

concluded

that

their

survey

confirmedconsumer behavior is changing under the impact of new technologies and especially
under the impact of the internet and e-commerce. They also suggested that values of todays
customer are speed of actions, independence, conveniences, economy of resources. By joining
together aspects of three main theories - adoption of the technologies and, information seeking
behavior and changing consumer behavior it is possible to create recommendations for a

company who would like to perform in the market with newchannel of communication in the
internet Thus the study is not only beneficial to study consumer behavior but shall help firms to
have a better understanding of their new and existing customers.
(Hall and Khan), 2002 in the review of the adoption of new technologies tried to study both
intrinsic as well as extrinsic factors that can affect the behavior of the customers. According to
them whether new technology becomes a success or not depends on a great extent on dynamic
factors implicit in the process, such as ongoing improvement in both old and new technologies.
To them perhaps the most important such factor is the need to develop complementary skills
and capital goods, especially in the case of systemic or general purpose technologies such as
electricity and information technology. They focused to a great extent on micro-economic
determinants, in part because these have proved to be the most important in explaining the
broad patterns of technology diffusion, especially within a single country or economic system

Research Objective

1.
To find out the peculiarities of consumer behavior caused by rapid adoption of Mobile
Phone technologies.
2.
To Study the impact of rapid adoption of Mobile Phone technology on consumers
perception of Mobile Phone manufacturing industrys credibility.
3.
To gain new insights about how rapid adoption technology affects the mindset of
consumers towards changing products.
4.
To help companies understand their behavior of customers under changing product
offerings

Hypothesis
H1: Rapid adoption of Mobile Phone technology adoption has an impact on consumer
behavior.
H1.a: This increases the consumers trust towards the telecom company.
H1.b: This helps the telecom company to increase the customer base.

Scope of the Study

Rapid adoption of technology is prevalent in almost all industries. The present study shall
focus on Mobile Phone Manufacturing sector. Experiments shall be conducted at different
age groups and shall include consumers from various age groups and market segments. The
research shall try to fill a gap that has been created by earlier studies which have been confined
to the work related acceptance of technological changes and shall try to study the behavioral
impact of the adoption of new technologies on common people i.e. shall study the customer
behavior in general B2C market. This shall ensure diversity in the sample and shall account for
variation if any. The study shall be able to find links between consumer behavior and the
adoption of technologies by companies if any exists.

Data & Research Methodology

In order to study consumer behavior Researchers conduct experiments or controlled studies
that take place in artificial settings in order to find that one variable causes changes in another.
This is also supported by the fact that most of the previous studies conducted to study impact of
rapid adoption of technology on consumer behavior have used experiments to reach their
conclusions.
In the current study we shall also use experiments to investigate the problem in hand. The
original TAM model proposed by Davis shall be used to build the conceptual clarity on
Technological Adoption. The experiments shall be conducted in and around Mumbai and the
data collected shall be analyzed using different statistical techniques, as has been done in the
past. Other than Regression and Correlation techniques can be applied to various variables shall
ensure to establish a relationship between them. Use of psychometric scales shall be also
helpful.
Sample Size and Method: A Sample of almost 1000 customers using simple random sampling
technique shall be used. It shall ensure that no personal bias creeps into the whole work and the
sample size shall ensure that the study extends to the best possible area of the universe giving
fair results.

Utility of the Study

The findings of the study shall fill the gap in the existing literature. The research shall
contribute to better understanding of the factors that influences consumer behavior in
electronic environment especially telecommunication environment. There is lot of potential
for further analysis of consumer behavior. Most of the previous studies have been done on
adoption of technology to job related areas like DBMS and other information systems
leading to gap between researches done on general adoption of technology by common
masses. Therefore the findings shall be important to develop new methods and techniques
for evaluation of consumer behavior in e-environment.

Tentative Chapter Scheme

Chapter I: Introduction
Objective & Rationale of the Study

Chapter II: Review of Literature

Chapter III: Rapid adoption of Mobile Phone technology.

Chapter IV: Research Methodology
Hypothesis
Data

Sets

Measures
Hypothesis Testing

Chapter V: Results

Chapter VI: Analysis and Discussion

Chapter VII: Limitations and Future Research

Appendices

References and Bibliography

Select References

Ajzen, I. (1991). The Theory of Planned Behavior, Organizational Behavior and

Human Decision Processes, 179-211.

Davis, F.D. (1989). Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use, and User
Acceptance of Information Technology, MIS Quarterly 13 (3), 319-340.

ElinaGaile-Sarkane (2009) Impact of technology adoption on consumer behavior

ISSN 1822-6515 Economics & Management 2009. 14

Hall and Khan ,Nov 2002, Adoption of New Technology, New Economy
Handbook

Hoyer, Wayne D., Deborah J. MacInnis and RikPieters (2008). Consumer

Behavior, Chula Vista, South-Western College, 5thEdition.

Information Technology: Toward a Unified View, MIS Quarterly, 27 (3), 425478

Kaasinen, Eija. (2005). User acceptance of mobile services-value, ease of use,

trust and ease of adoption. http://www.vtt.fi/inf/pdf/publications/2005/P566.pdf
(23.10.2008.)

M. Khan (2007), Consumer Behavior and Advertising Management, New Delhi,

New Age International.

Venkatesh V, Morris M, Davis G, and Davis F. (2003). User Acceptance of

Information Technology: Toward a Unified View, MIS Quarterly, 27 (3), 425478