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Methodology
In this chapter, how the research is designed and conducted are discussed. The detailed survey is based on the former research regarding the brand avoidance behavior and mobile consumer segmentation. Judgmental sampling is selected as the sampling method. Coefficient of variables, Factor analysis and multi-regression analysis are suppose to help to make the analysis. KMO tests are run to check if the research suits the factor analysis and Cronbach’s alpha tests are applied to check the validity of the research.
Research Philosophy
Philosophy is about how we see the world, and how we do with it (Saunders et al, 2012). During the research, the research philosophy is going to guide the research in how to analysis the problem, which approach to go, which methods to take and how to get the data to explain (Saunders et al, 2012). In the business research field, there are four perspectives of philosophy, they are pragmatism, positivism, realism and interpretivism (Saunders et al, 2012).
The pragmatic research philosophy accept only the concepts that support the research action. Research questions are the most important factor to determine the philosophy, and it can contain both positivism and interpretivism at the same time. For the research approach, it can also both go with deductive, inductive, or a mix of both based on the need of the research (Saunders et al, 2012).
The positivistic research philosophy suggest the knowledge should be learnt based on the observation or the measurements of the facts. Researchers are supposed to collect the data and make the analysis based on the data, which is believed as reliable. Usually the positivistic research conducted with the deductive research approach with the quantitive research method and statistic analysis (Saunders et al, 2012).
The realistic research philosophy holds to the idea the world exist independently from the human beings, human can know about the world based on the sensations and experiences. The realism are divided into two groups as the direct realism and critical realism. The direct realism advocates through the sensations and experience, human can tell what the world looks like, while the critical realism argues the sensations and experience can be deceptive and usually do not portray the world (Saunders et al, 2012).
Interpretivism research philosophy require the participation of the research to interpret the elements of the research, because the interpretivism believe the world is different based on the view of the people. Usually, the interpretivism research focusing on understanding the meanings and can be conducted thorough the multiple research methods (Saunders et al, 2012).
Based on the understanding of the research philosophies, this research holds the positivistic perspective for the research philosophy. As mentioned in the Introduction, this research is interested in finding the main driver(s) for the Chinese mobile consumers’ brand avoidance behavior and literatures have helped to build a testable hypotheses. The research thus need to fact to test and prove the hypotheses. Researchers need to collect amount of the data regarding the Chinese mobile consumers’ brand avoidance behavior to figure out the driver(s) behind people’s behavior. The research needs amount of the fact instead of interpreting few consumers’ opinion because few people’s opinions may have strong bias and can’t represent Chinese mobile consumers. Based on the former research from Lee et al. (2009) and Knittel et al. (2016), the authors’ perspective is to obtain the factual knowledge through following the instructions as the data collector and make the analysis based on the data. During the process, the authors will try to avoid personal understanding that may cause the bias in understanding the reason for people’ brand avoidance behavior.
Research Approach
The research approach is how how the researchers viewing the data and theories (Saunders et al, 2012). There are three types of the research approaches, the inductive approach, deductive approach, and abductive approach (Saunders et al, 2012; Bryman & Bell, 2011). The inductive research starts with the data, based on the collected data, the researchers conclude the general understanding, and further theories and frameworks are built (Bryman & Bell, 2011). The deductive research goes from the opposite direction, the research start with the existing theories, using the theories to answer the research questions. Based on the existing theories, researchers can learn about the knowledge regarding the research problem, and develop possible hypothesis accordingly. The data are collected to analysis and test the hypothesis to tell if the theories are accepted to not in the given cases (Bryman & Bell, 2011). The abductive research is used in the case where the current theory need to modify or do not cover the field, the new theories are required to answer the research questions. For the abductive research, the researchers collect the data to build the new theory and deductive the theory again, and collect the data to prove the theory (Bryman & Bell, 2011).
In this research, as a positivism research, a deductive research approach is applied. The relevant literatures were collected in the literature review part to understand the research problem and develop the hypothesis to answer the research question. The current literature provided a clear framework and possible factors to explain the occurrence of the brand avoidance and how to understand the Chinese mobile market and Chinese mobile consumers. The data is supposed to collected to test the hypothesis to tell if the result goes as expected.
Research Design
The research design is the road map for the researchers. For the different purpose, the researchers use the different research designs. The research design can be catalogued into three types, exploratory research, descriptive research and causal research (Saunders et al., 2012). The exploratory research design is using for finding the unknown areas, usually when the research filed is not well developed or lacks a framework. In that case, the existing literature can not really answer the research questions and the exploratory research design is applied to built the theory to explain. The descriptive research is used when the possible reasons and facts are already existed in the literatures, but the data are not collected yet to prove the literature. The descriptive research design is used to collect the facts or data in applying the existing literature. The casual research is used to explore the cause-effect relationship between the independent variables and dependent variables. The casual research is usually used to answer the Why research questions (Saunders et al., 2012).
This research is trying to collect the data to tell the fact about the reasons for Chinese customer’s brand avoidance in the mobile phone industry. Based on the understanding of the research design, this research should be catalogued as a descriptive research design. The descriptive research can be further catalogued as the cross-sectional research and the longitudinal research (Saunders et al., 2012). The cross-sectional research involve the data collected from the sample group only once. The cross-sectional research can be either single cross-sectional design, only one sample are selected and data from the sample only obtained once, and multiple cross-sectional design, two or more sample from the participants are selected and the data from the samples are obtain once (Moutinho & Hutcheson, 2011). The longitudinal research involve the data collected from the sample group for two or more times. The longitudinal research is describing the faces based on the timeline (Saunders et al., 2012).
This research is trying to study Chinese consumer brand avoidance and its driver(s) at the present time. The research should be considered as the cross-sectional research. For the sampling drawing, this research only draw the sample from the population for once. Thus, the research should follow the single cross-sectional design.
Data Collection Method
To conduct the deductive single cross-sectional design research, the recommended research method is a quantitive research, namely a survey (Moutinho & Hutcheson, 2011). The other quantitative research method, structured observation (Saunders et al., 2012) has been considered. However, the observation method can help to tell the behavior but can not tell the reason behind the behavior (Bryman & Bell, 2011), and can not really answer the research question.
A survey is able to obtain the data from larger quantity of participants with less interruption (Bryman & Bell, 2011). A survey provides the qualitative data to the researcher to analysis and answer the research questions. From the qualitative data, researchers can have a detailed the look for the problem (Bryman & Bell, 2011). In this research, the larger quantity sample from the participants are required to be represent for the Chinese people. Thus, the survey is the good method to conduct the research.
There are several collection methods of survey based on the communication type with the participants, including online survey, telephone survey, face-to-face survey, and postal survey (Saunders et al., 2012). Choosing the type of the survey should based on the habits of samples selected. For this research, the participants should come from the people living in the developed cities in China. In that case, the online survey is better than the other methods for the distance and range consideration. The online survey can be conducted through the email, mobile device, and computer. The participants can do the survey at home or the workplace (Saunders et al., 2012).
The report from CNNIC (2016), suggested the social media can be a good approach to make contact with the mobile phone users. More than 89% of the mobile phone users visit the social media websites. The top three social media websites and applications used are Wechat, Weibo, and Momo. Among three, WeChat and Momo share the similar point as the app is built on the people’s relationship. Weibo, on the other hand, is the open platform while the unknown people can also get social and access to the information. Considering the research should cover as much participants as possible, Weibo is selected as the approach to access the participants.
Survey design
As the research method has been decided as online survey with the social media, the next step is deciding the content of the survey. As the literature part suggested, the research is considered to contain two parts as the brand avoidance part and Chinese consumer’s part. For the brand avoidance part, the current theories have listed the five types of the brand avoidance as the experiential avoidance, identity avoidance, moral avoidance, deficit-value avoidance, and advertising avoidance. The current literature has offered the research with a systematical core framework (Lee et al., 2009), and the brand avoidance has been explored in different industry and the cases in the qualitative research method. For the Chinese consumer’s part, the former research has suggested the Chinese mobile consumers can be catalogued into five type based on people’s vale and lifestyle and the key buying factors and listed their features accordingly.
In that case, the survey is designed with eight parts based on the literature, including the participants’ demographic information, segmentation standards, brand avoidance behavior, possible reasons in experience avoidance, identity avoidance, moral avoidance, deficit-value avoidance, and advertising avoidance.
For segmentation standards, the standards are made on the feature of the consumers described in the literature (Ma, 2012). As mentioned in the literature part, Ma (2012) chose the 15 questions from the value and lifestyle scale and adjust to the mobile industry in his research. As the purpose of applying the scale is to segment the Chinese mobile consumers, the same scale can help the researchers to use Ma’s result with the same process. In that case, the original scale from Ma is applied.
For the brand avoidance part, it consist two part the brand avoidance behavior and the brand avoidance types. Lee et al. (2009) and Knittel et al. (2016) offers a core framework to understand the brand avoidance behavior, but it is not enough to build up the scale, Petrou and Naude (n.d.) has first applied the quantitative method in the brand avoidance study, and offers the scale build on the core framework from Lee et al. (2009) and Knittel et al. (2016), which can also help this research. While, the questions from Petrou and Naude still need to be modified to adjust the case of mobile phone as their study in focusing on the service brand avoidance. To adjust the questions into the mobile phone’s case, the researchers collect the opinions regarding people’s complain and avoidance behavior from the blog, websites and compare with Petrou and Naude’s scale.
The demographic information also keep track with Petrou and Naude’s scale to offer the same information, this part also include the investigation on people’s current using phone, and the mobile they have used in the past and avoid now, the usage time for the phone and the participation situation when people purchase their phone, as the brand avoidance won’t occur if people do not participate in the purchasing process. The demographic part is split into two parts as the background part and the demographic part in the survey. The background part are put in the beginning in convince for the researchers to remove the answers from the unqualified participants.
The further consideration is about the way to ask the questions and how much questions can be asked to the participants. The chosen way to ask the major questions, questions regarding the brand avoidance attitude, experience avoidance, identity avoidance, moral avoidance, deficit-value avoidance, and advertising avoidance, using a Likert scale.
A Likert scale is chosen because it is mature, easy to execute and common used method in the business areas (Tu, 2012). Likert scale is a summated rating scale. The scale need to follow the rules as the scale must contain the multiple questions and the for each question, the answer should be quantified to be measured, there is no right answer in the scale, and the participants should pay the equal attention to all the questions presenting in the declarative sentence (Spector, 1992). The scale can be either in odd number or the even number (Tu, 2012). The odd number is the common used scale, where the choice can be three, five, nine points for the participants. the scale with more than nine points can be confusing for the participants to choose (Tu, 2012). The recommended points numbers are from five to nine (Spector, 1992). The difference between odd number scale and the even number scale is the central point “neutral” for the participants. If the researcher need the participants to make a choice for the preference, then the even number scale will be applied (Tu, 2012). Using 5-point or the 7-point scale will not cause a significant difference for the result (Dawes, 2008). This research is gong to apply the 5-point Likert scale.
Regarding the number of the questions should be asked, because the survey contains the eight parts, participants may lose the interest to answer the question if too many questions are asked. The recommended the number for the multiple dimension survey with more than 5 dimensions are 8 questions for each part in the draft and select 4-6 questions for the final survey (Tu, 2012). The research is designed accordingly. In total, The research contains 54 items, including 10 items regarding the demographic information, 15 items for value and lifestyle, 31 items are selected from Petrou and Naude’s scale and slightly adjusted with the content into the mobile phone’s case. Following listed the scale for each part.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
1.1.Problem discussion
1.2.Research Purpose
1.3.Delimitation
1.4.Key Terms
2. Literature Review
2.1.Anti-consumption
2.2.Brand Avoidance
2.3.Chinese Mobile Consumer
2.4.Segmentation
2.5.Hypothesis
3. Methodology
3.1.Research Philosophy
3.2.Research Approach
3.3.Research Design
3.4.Data Collection Method
3.5. Survey design
3.6. Sampling Selection and Pre-test
3.7.Data Analysis Process
3.8.Validity and Reliability
4. Finding
4.1.Responses and reliability test
4.2.Participants profile
4.3.Descriptive information
4.4.Brand avoidance among the consumers
4.5.Brand avoidance among each types of consumers
5. Discussion
5.1.Main driver among Chinese mobile consumers
5.2.Content of the drivers
6. Conclusion
6.1 Research result
6.2 Limitations
6.4 Future research
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Brand avoidance among the Chinese consumers in the mobile industry
