EDUCATED PERSON’S CHOICE CRITERIA IN BUYING A SMARTPHONE

Introduction
Mobile phones have improved the communication among people. The number of mobile
phone users is increasing day by day dramatically and is also expected to increase in the
future. Increasing development in information communication technology has led to huge
attention over the mobile phones having extra features which are referred as
smartphones (Hassan, 2014). The university students’ market segment in Pakistan is
facing an unending range of choices especially about mobile phones (Soomro, 2013).

The evolution of electronic media has been fast and swift worldwide with
smartphones playing a major role in its growth. People are getting access to internet
for the first time in South Asia making it a profitable market and Pakistan’s mobile
phone market is also flourishing. As per Pakistan Telecommunication Authority’s
report (2016) there were 31.77 million smartphone users in Pakistan and they would
reach 40 million by the end of year 2016. While Smart phone use has been increasing
in all economic and age sectors, university/college students have been labelled as
one of the most important target markets (Jurisic & Azevedo, 2011). This trend is also
found in Pakistani cellular market. A large number of youth is enrolled in higher
education institutions that make a hot market segment for marketers of mobile
phone in Pakistan (Soomro, 2013). In Pakistan 77% of smartphone users are just 21 to
30 years old while 68% of the smartphone users use Android version of smartphone
(Infographics report 2014).

The factors which affect consumers’ mobile phone/smartphone purchasing decision has
received an immense attention of the researchers worldwide. This is because the
consumers do not view smartphones just as devices for calling and texting, but as multi-use
devices which involves gaming, socializing, and downloading applications which results in a
radical shift in the behavior patterns, lifestyle and status of people (Shin, 2012).

Many researches have been conducted in universities situating in different areas of the
world to find out the factors which affect youth’s purchase decision about smartphones.
But consumer segmentation on the basis of demographic characteristics have been given
very low attention. Therefore we aim to find out the influence of Brand name, Innovative
Features, Price and income levels of consumers on Purchase decision regarding their
smartphone selection.