From free trial to purchase. How users decide to download and purchase a mobile app

Nowadays, the mobile applications become an inseparable part of our life. There is a large amount of people who are dealing with mobile applications(apps)every day from end users of application to the big company's who developed platforms for the market, to giants who produce smart phones, to small and medium enterprise who produce applications, all are somehow in relation with app market. Beside mobile applications provide new ways of doing business for old companies. It looks like a second boom in Information Technology industry after the first one which was the internet boom at the beginning of the millennium. However, there has been not sufficient effort in business disciplines to analyze this field under a consumers’ behavior and firm perspective The purpose of this study is to shed more light on the immature literature of consumer behavior in the mobile application market and assess the key drivers of consumer decision to use. To achieve this purpose I adopted exploratory research approach by means of systematically literature review in the relevant subjects in marketing and information system like technology based services and technology acceptance models. First, I studied the general characteristics of mobile applications as a growing technology market, the role of different actors including platform provides, app producers and consumers, and the benefits of applications for both firms and customers. Second, I tried to identify the factors that App users consider important in their process of decision making in order to download a free trial of mobile application in the first step. Here, the five main factors have been identified: Technology readiness (TR), consumer knowledge (CK), social effect, network externalities and application content. I categorized these factors in three main groups: first, consumer characteristics including TR and CK, second, social influence which consist of social effects and network externalities, and finally app content as third group of factors. The first two groups are considered as exogenous to firms, although essential in the consumer decision making process. The last one is the group of factors which could be strategized by companies in order to stimulate the customers to use their products. The other part of the model is related to the post download experience of a user from the application. Here by using a trial version of an application customers could judge better about the application and decide to use/buy it or leave it. In this stage, I developed a new version of servqual measurement for mobile application by borrowing from the e-service quality measurement literature. To sum up my research model I propose a research framework which shows the antecedents that lead costumers to download a free trial of an app and after satisfactory process lead to buy it. Finally, I designed the required questionnaire for this research and developed the methodology of gathering and analyzing data for the possible next steps being this research a proposal framework that could be empirical tested in future studies

Lo scopo di questo studio è quello di far luce sulla letteratura, ancora poco sviluppata, che si occupa dei comportamenti dei consumatori nel mercato delle applicazioni mobili. Nello studio sono stati identificati i fattori che gli utenti considererebbero importanti nel processo decisionale che conduce all’installazione di un’applicazione mobile, nella versione di prova gratuita. I cinque fattori principali sono stati identificati in: conoscenze tecnologiche, conoscenze del consumatore, effetti sociali, esternalità di rete e contenuto delle applicazioni. L’altra parte del modello è relativa all’esperienza del consumatore successiva al download della versione gratuita. Un modello teorico mostra i fattori antecedenti il download e il processo successivo che partendo dalla soddisfazione dell’utente porta all’acquisto della versione a pagamento. Infine, viene proposto un questionario e una metodologia per raccogliere ed analizzare i dati, per futuri approfondimenti sul tema in oggetto.