Factors Affecting Mobile Users’ Switching Intentions: A Comparative Study between the Brazilian and German Markets

Abstract

In the competitive wireless market, there are many drivers behind customer defection. Switching barriers, service performance, perceived value in carriers’ offers, satisfaction and other constructs can play a pivotal role in customer switching processes among carriers. This study attempts to compare the influence of these factors, taking into account cultural similarities and dissimilarities, between Brazilian and German mobile users. A survey was conducted on two samples, comprising 202 users in Brazil and 200 users in Germany, with culture being employed as a context variable to compare their behavior. Analysis by means of multi-group structural equation modeling suggests that, in both countries, customer satisfaction, service performance and perceived value have important roles in defining customer switching intentions, while switching barriers did not prove to have significant effects upon switching behavior. The results also suggest that the two cultures are sufficientlysimilar (considering the sample and the variables involved in the model) to not present differences in the studied consumer behavior, except for the effect of service performance upon satisfaction.

Keywords

• switching intentions
• satisfaction
• mobile telephony
• cross-cultural comparison
• cultural distance.