What colour are you? : smartphone addiction traffic lights and user profiles

Purpose The key concern nowadays is smartphone addiction and user profiles. Following the risk and protective factors framework, the authors aim to characterize smartphone users according to two levels: (1) individual: referred to the use (i.e. boredom proneness, compulsive app downloading smartphone addiction) and (2) microsystem: referred to family and peers (i.e. family harmony and phubbing). Besides, the authors will derive useful managerial implications and strategies. Design/methodology/approach First, an extensive literature revision and in-depth interviews with experts were employed to identify the addiction-related variables at the individual and microsystem level. Second, information was collected from a sample of 275 Spanish smartphone users, and a K-means clustering algorithm was employed to classify smartphone users. Findings The proposed traffic lights schema identifies three users' profiles (red, yellow and green) regarding their smartphone addiction and considering individual and microsystem critical variables. Originality/value This study proposes a practical and pioneer traffic lights schema to classify smartphone users and facilitate each cluster's strategies development.