Do Customer Dissatisfaction and Variety Seeking Really Affect the Product Brand Switching? A Lesson from the Biggest Southeast Asia Mobile Telecommunication Market

Abstract

As the 21st century world would be a cellular age going by the phenomenal increase in cell phones worldwide, the Southeast Asia's market is experiencing a tremendous growth of mobile penetrations in the context of a region for developing countries with large population concentration. The mobile revolution has triumphed in Southeast Asia and become the key hub of the world’s mobile & telecom market in terms of penetration and innovation, and promoted the best of mobile-based implementations in the region Asia. Therefore, as the competition becomes more intensified, it is important to any companies to anticipate any changes in its customers’ preferences, especially all variables related to the customer dissatisfaction and varieties seeking that are much revealed in prior studies. This study has two objectives; firstly, it aims to examine the effect of consumer dissatisfaction, variety seeking, and sales promotions simultaneously on brand switching. Secondly, it will explore a further relationship, which is rarely investigated in prior studies, between consumer dissatisfaction and brand switching, which is moderated by the variety seeking. By using 240 respondents in the 2010-GSM prepaid cards' market situation, we used logistic regression to analyze the data. The results reveal that consumer dissatisfaction and sales promotion are significantly positive related to brand switching. The variety seeking moderates the effect of consumer dissatisfaction on brand switching, and as the moderating variable, the variety seeking has weakened the effect of consumer dissatisfaction on brand switching. Keyword: Consumer Dissatisfaction, Variety Seeking, Sales Promotions, Brand Switching. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________