Consumer Location Based Service Perceptions and Response: a focus on Location Based Services and Emerging Mobile Lifestyles

Location Based Services (LBS) and electronically mediated lifestyles (e-lifestyles) represent emergent new areas with approaches (e.g. apps and e-activities) billed to change customer experiences and responses. Marketers are confronted with a challenge of understanding how consumers engage with mobile services and how to design appropriate strategies towards that (Donovan, 2013). A review of extant literature has indicated that the implementation of marketing strategies based on LBS is still in its infancy, and yet to gain widespread acceptance by consumers. The role of individual differences in consumer response to LBS is not reported in any substantive way in the literature- yet we know that e-lifestyles are now shaping different consumer responses to LBS. This PhD addresses this important area, with a focus on the role of e-lifestyles in consumer response to location-based services. The study relied on a sequential multimethod qualitative method of enquiry. Initially, in the first phase of data collection, relevant LBS websites were observed over a three-month period to explore consumer familiarity, attitudes and experience, offering some rich insights into consumer LBS awareness. In phase two of the research, specialist interviews (thirty-eight in total) were used in conjunction with cartoon tests as an effective way to establish the role of e-lifestyles, situational decision making as well as capturing actual (typical) consumer response in LBS encounters. In phase three, three focus groups were conducted with different user groups (young students, young professionals and older established working participants with families) to examine the role of individual factors in consumer LBS response. Findings in the study point to good experience with LBS with some selective engagement depending on user group profile, which broke down into ‘Involved’, ‘Observer’ or ‘Transaction’ orientations. Phase two (innovative cartoon tests) led to findings that mapped actual consumer response pathways in simulated encounters- four response pathways unique to this study emerged (immediate, delayed/future response, socially-mediated response and indifference). Findings also point towards influential individual factors such as variation on the basis of life stage, distinct patterns of proactivity and reactivity to LBS messages and the importance of situational factors on the nature of LBS response. This study contributes to the body of knowledge on LBS and e-lifestyles theory by providing deeper insights on actual consumer response process in typical LBS encounters (e.g. the UK context). It adds fresh insights into typical response processes by using specialist scenarios reflective of typical LBS encounters to map key response pathways, capturing ‘live’ customer experiences of different forms of LBS and interrogating the rationale behind individual responses using LBS scenarios. Findings also offer a clearer classification of customer response types (e.g. proactive and self-referencing LBS; reactive and cross-referencing LBS). By combining situational context, e-lifestyle and individual attributes influencing individual response to LBS in a single study, this research takes forward the argument of Weiss (2013) on the need for more in-depth examination of consumer response to LBS and takes further previous LBS adoption studies (Zhou, 2012)