The impact of mobile service attributes on males’ and females’ purchase decision

In the current competitive environment where organizations have a very narrow window of opportunity to get their competitive edge, investigating the role of gender in purchase decisions is very significant for organizations as they segment the market not only on price and customer needs, but also on gender. Men and women have different characteristics and preferences which impact their purchase decisions. This paper investigates the impact of mobile service attributes on both genders by making use of Ajzen’s theory of planned behavior. Five mobile services attributes: call rates, service quality, service availability, and promotion and brand image were adopted from previous researches as independent variables. Another two variables (attitude to purchase and intention to purchase) were also taken from previous literature as dependent variables. A conceptual model was developed to construct a relation between the independent and dependent variables and then through regression analysis, we tested the hypothesis that there are differences in preference for the two genders. Through convenience sampling we have chosen 200 female and male university students. The results of the regression analysis showed that only one attribute out of five is significant for female mobile users (service quality), whereas for male users three out of five attributes are significant (service quality, service availability, and brand image). As far as Ajzen’s TPB is concerned, being male has a positive significant relation with all TPB variables (P<0.05,) and being female has a positive insignificant impact on subjective norms and perceived behavioral control, but negative insignificant influence on perceived difficulty.