Exploring the factors influencing users’ intention to switch MIM application: A push, pull, mooring framework perspective : Master thesis
Sammanfattning: The increased penetration of smartphones and cheap and easy access to the internethave made mobile instant messaging (MIM) services really popular, rapidly evolving,and mass-adopted. Today the mobile instant messaging (MIM) market is dominated bythe social media giant Facebook which with its two major MIM services FacebookMessenger and WhatsApp, owns about 80 percent of the whole market. However asmore and more people become more aware of their online privacy, people seem to beleaving platforms such as WhatsApp for other platforms. But why is this happening andwhat could be the reasons for this switching behavior? This paper aims to extend theunderstanding of consumer service switching behavior by using the Push, pull, mooring(PPM) framework in the context of MIM. The PPM framework has been acknowledgedto help explain and predict switching behaviors in various offline contexts and onlinecontexts. The framework consists of pull factors which are factors that attract users toan alternative service, push factors that drive users away from an incumbent service,and mooring factors that keep the users using a service even though there are betteralternatives. This study used alternative attractiveness and social influence as pullfactors, dissatisfaction, low trust, and information privacy concerns as push factors andinertia as a mooring factor. Inertia in turn has four components; affective commitment,switching costs, habit, and unfavorable subjective norm. All of the pull and push factorswere hypothesized in this study to have a positive impact on the user's intention toswitch MIM providers. This study used a non-probability sample in order to distributean online survey to collect the necessary data in order to test the hypotheses formulatedin this study. The results seem to indicate that the pull factors, alternative attractiveness,and social influence as well as the push factors dissatisfaction and information privacyhave a significant effect on a MIM user’s switching intention while the inertiacomponents affective commitment, habit, and unfavorable subjective norm aresignificant to inertia. However, the inertia component switching cost fails to accomplishthe same result. On the other hand, the push factor low trust failed to give a significantresult. At the same time inertia, which acts as a mooring factor, seems to negativelyaffect MIM users switching intention.
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