Insights into the Behavior of Japan's Keitai User: IUJ Faculty Activity Report

Takahiro MIYAO (Head, Japanese Institute of Global Communications)

Two IUJ professors, Glenn Meyhew and Philip Sidel jointly made a very insightful and stimulating presentation about consumer behavior on the mobile Internet at a lunch-time seminar organized by the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan on November 18, 2003.

First, Prof. Meyhew summarized their initial findings that in spite of high expectations regarding the mobile Internet as a powerful marketing platform, none of the supposedly important factors in contextual marketing, such as context, location and time of the day, could provide any clear pattern of mobile consumer behavior, according to their survey research (for a more detailed explanation about their initial research result, see the following URL on the GLOCOM Platform: http://www.glocom.org/debates/20030107_sidel_tf/). Based on their negative results from sole reliance on objective factors in contextual marketing,　Prof. Meyhew suggested that there might be a key role played by affective factors as indicated by users' answers to the question: what do you like most about your keitai?

In his follow-up presentation, Prof. Sidel talked about their current research agenda, mainly focusing on international comparisons regarding mobile users' perceptions about keitai. According to his recent study, there does not seem to exist much difference between European users and their Japanese counterparts with regard to positive or negative perceptions about keitai usage, although one might notice that European users are a little more price sensitive, while Japanese users are more technologically oriented.

Then he explained a very interesting approach, namely "ZMET" (Zaltman's Metaphor Elicitation Technique), where visual images are utilized to sense keitai users' perceptions and experiences to see how much is shared by two different groups of users, such as keitai users in Japan and those in Indonesia. It has turned out that about 70 percent of attitudes are shared by Japanese and Indonesian users and, interestingly, the remaining 30 percent is not primarily due to their cultural differences but rather due to differences in the rate of penetration and diffusion. One of the important points made by Prof. Sidel is the fact that shared attitudes are not all positive, and positive expectations and negative perceptions such as addiction, crime and "can't escape" seem to coexist, and possibly provide an important clue to effective marketing based on the mobile Internet.

In conclusion, Prof. Sidel cited five key components, users, society, network, handsets and context, and suggested the strongest interaction between users and society and some connection between users and context as well as beween users and handsets, the rest being marginal. The next step is to quantify all these factors and relations, and test various hypotheses. In any case, their approaches look really promising to find out what could be real drivers for mobile Internet users in Japan and elsewhere in the world.