The Impact of Country of Origin in Mobile Phone Choice of Generation Y and Z

Mobile phones play a very important role in our life. Mobile phone sales have been soaring over the last decade due to the growing acceptance of technological innovations, especially by Generations Y and Z. Understanding the change in customers' requirement is the key to success in the smartphone business. New, strong mobile phone models will emerge if the voice of the customer can be heard. Although it has been widely known that country of origin has serious impact on the attitudes and purchase decisions of mobile phone consumers, there lack substantial studies that investigate the mobile phone preference of young adults aged 18-25, members of late Generation Y and early Generation Z. In order to investigate the role of country of origin in mobile phone choice of Generations Y and Z, an online survey with 228 respondents was conducted in Hungary in 2016. Besides the descriptive statistical methods, crosstabs, ANOVA and Pearson correlation are used to analyze the collected data and find out significant relationships. Factor analysis (Principal Component Analysis) is used for data reduction to create new factor components. The findings of this exploratory study support the idea that country of origin plays a significant role in many respects related to young adults' mobile phone choice. Mobile phone owners with different countries of origin attribute crucial importance to the various product features including technical parameters, price, design, brand name, operating system, and memory size. Country of origin has a moderating effect on the price sensitivity of consumers with varied net income levels. It is also found that frequent buyers of mobile phones, especially US brand products, spend the most significant amount of money for their consumption in this aspect.