The ongoing diffusion and growing use of smartphones have located the mobile apps at the center of the media landscape. In the hyper-competitive mobile landscape with an infinite range of choices, users constantly shift between apps. Some users tend t...
The ongoing diffusion and growing use of smartphones have located the mobile apps at the center of the media landscape. In the hyper-competitive mobile landscape with an infinite range of choices, users constantly shift between apps. Some users tend to use diverse apps simultaneously, while others choose to use only a select few. In recent years, with the expansion of mobile apps in the marketplace that aim to serve narrower and more specific information needs of users, what we access to obtain information has become of utmost interest to marketers and mobile service providers as much as what we seek and what we do on mobile. In this context, this study focused on the function of mobile apps, namely the native apps and mobile browsers, as sources and intermediaries of information.
To provide a comprehensive overview of the current mobile information seeking behavior, a repertoire approach was applied, which measures a set of apps in use. To this end, a focus group interview and a preliminary survey were preceded by the actual survey.
The data from the sample of 1,139 Korean mobile users revealed that participants were using an average of 29 apps to seek and obtain information in the 10 given domains of information. In terms of the size of the 10 sub-repertoires, Shopping constituted the largest size of repertoire, followed by News and Entertainment. Then this study looked into the dependence on mobile browsers in terms of mobile information seeking and the composition of top 30 apps ranked by the sum of the frequency of use by app.
Lastly, this study identified six demographic and six psychological variables that may affect the size of repertoire based on literature review across the domain of mobile use behavior, information seeking and media repertoire. The hierarchical multiple regression results showed that, of the demographic factors, gender, education level, mobile communication cost and average daily traveling time were found to have significant effects on the size of repertoire. For psychological factors, variety-seeking tendency, hedonic motive of browsing through mobile apps and mobile efficacy were shown to be predictive for the repertoire size.
To conclude, this study provides a snapshot of the current mobile environment in line with the long-run research question from traditional media repertoire studies, that is, whether the tremendous increase in the number of media actually leads to the diversification of media use. In addition, the exploratory findings on factors affecting the repertoire size should serve as a baseline understanding for planning future research and mobile marketing strategies.