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One of the most important trends in today’s marketplace is consumers’ increased reliance on smartphones not only as a communication device but also as a central platform for accessing information, entertainment and other consumption activities—the so-called “mobile revolution” (Ackley 2015). While the marketing implications of mobile platforms are receiving emerging attention in the marketing modeling literature (e.g., Danaher et al. 2015; Ghose and Han 2011; Sultan et al. 2009), still very little is known about the consumption psychology of smartphone usage. The purpose of my dissertation is to address this void by examining what is fundamentally different about the psychology of smartphone use. The dissertation consists of two essays examining two complementary components of mobile consumer behavior. In the first essay I focus on clarifying the particular type of relationship that consumers form with their smartphones. Specifically, I advance the hypothesis that smartphones often fulfill the role of “attachment objects” for consumers. That is, smartphones are now used by many consumers in much the same way as pacifiers or security blankets are used by children—which I refer to as the Adult Pacifier Hypothesis. Consistent with this hypothesis, results from two controlled lab experiments show that relative to a comparable device such as one’s personal computer, engaging with one’s smartphone provides greater comfort as well as faster recovery from a stressful situation, both of which are defining characteristics of attachment objects. A third lab study reveals that, under feelings of stress, people actively seek out and engage with the device over other objects in much the same way that a child would seek out and engage with his or her pacifier. Also consistent with this hypothesis, a fourth study shows that the drive to use one’s smartphone becomes especially pronounced among consumers who have recently quit smoking—that is, consumers who are particularly susceptible to anxiety and stress. In the second essay I document an important consequence of consumers’ increased reliance on their smartphones: its impact on user-generated content. Across three field studies and six controlled lab experiments, I find that smartphone usage drives the creation of content that is more emotional, specifically more positively emotional, and potentially more impactful than content generated on PCs. Overall, these findings provide insight into the psychology of the mobile consumer and its downstream marketing implications.

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 2012

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 2012

In this work we present a traffic information dissemination system that seeks to deliver relevant traffic information to drivers to help make their driving experience more efficient, pleasant and safe. The system uses the crowd of drivers as the main source of information. The crowd reports information about traffic either directly to our system’s central server or to social networks. In case the information is reported to a social network our system architecture allows the integration of social networks as a traffic information source. It also allows the integration of other traffic information sources such as local traffic monitoring agencies. Our system aggregates all traffic information and delivers it to drivers subscribed to the system when they demand it. In addition, our system provides an efficient navigation service that it takes into account the current traffic conditions when planning a route. Furthermore, it periodically checks if there are new traffic events that appear on the user’s current route in which case the system will automatically give the user an alternate route. We implement a prototype of our system that use the social networks as a traffic information source and through the prototype evaluation we show that the prototype of our system indeed delivers relevant traffic information to drivers and performs intelligent navigation. / Thesis (Master, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2012-04-30 14:49:14.933

This thesis is an autoethnographic investigation of smartphones. Employing a theoretical framework that views smartphones as an apparatus, I explore smartphones, the connections they make to others and to digital technology, the way they are altering space and time, the micro-physics of power that they employ, and their ability to provide agency. Cycling between autoethnographic vignettes and theory, I explain rhizomatic assemblages that are apparatuses while advocating for the adoption of this conceptual framework when examining the social aspects of smartphones. Within this framework I conclude that these devices can be liberating and binding at the same time, and that, if we seek to better understand and engage in algorithmic language, we will be better equipped to take advantage of points of rupture to create lines of flight that allow us to deterritorialize our social world in ways that afford us the most agency.

The smartphones’ market is characterized by its fast evolving environment. In such an environment, the key concern for each company is how to continually encourage consumers to upgrade to the latest version before their existing model expires, which also highlights the importance of continual product enhancement. Consumers choose high-tech products not only for their functional values, but also for their symbolic values. This phenomenon is even more prevalent among products that tend to be conspicuously consumed. The high portability and multi-functional capabilities of smartphones make their use highly visible to users’ social surroundings, and consumers may choose to upgrade their existing smartphones for the perceived symbolic values provided by newer and enhanced models. The great success of the iPhone inspired the current research to further investigate the antecedents of upgrade intention and to uncover the symbolic value that smartphones provide to consumers. Reference group conformity is not the only way to fulfill symbolic values of selected products. Consumers also have the tendency to actively express their ideal self-image through acquiring and displaying material symbols and an ideal self-image sometimes also refers to a self-image with higher social status. Building upon the Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991), the proposed research model also explores the possible moderating effect of status consumption on the TPB model. A survey will be administered to university students (smartphone users) to collect primary data to measure the effectiveness of the new proposed research model. The results of this study provided a better understanding of consumers’ upgrading purchase intentions toward smartphones. Additionally, this study finds that status consumption is partially related to smartphone purchases, which could also be extended to other technological products categories.

Indoor localization consists of locating oneself inside new buildings. GPS does not work indoors due to multipath reflection and signal blockage. WiFi based systems assume ubiquitous availability and infrastructure based systems require expensive installations, hence making indoor localization an open problem. This dissertation consists of solving the problem of indoor localization by thoroughly exploiting the indoor ambient magnetic fields comprising mainly of disturbances termed as anomalies in the Earth’s magnetic field caused by pillars, doors and elevators in hallways which are ferromagnetic in nature. By observing uniqueness in magnetic signatures collected from different campus buildings, the work presents the identification of landmarks and guideposts from these signatures and further develops magnetic maps of buildings - all of which can be used to locate and navigate people indoors. To understand the reason behind these anomalies, first a comparison between the measured and model generated Earth’s magnetic field is made, verifying the presence of a constant field without any disturbances. Then by modeling the magnetic field behavior of different pillars such as steel reinforced concrete, solid steel, and other structures like doors and elevators, the interaction of the Earth’s field with the ferromagnetic fields is described thereby explaining the causes of the uniqueness in the signatures that comprise these disturbances. Next, by employing the dynamic time warping algorithm to account for time differences in signatures obtained from users walking at different speeds, an indoor localization application capable of classifying locations using the magnetic signatures is developed solely on the smart phone. The application required users to walk short distances of 3-6 m anywhere in hallway to be located with accuracies of 80-99%. The classification framework was further validated with over 90% accuracies using model generated magnetic signatures representing hallways with different kinds of pillars, doors and elevators. All in all, this dissertation contributes the following: 1) provides a framework for understanding the presence of ambient magnetic fields indoors and utilizing them to solve the indoor localization problem; 2) develops an application that is independent of the user and the smart phones and 3) requires no other infrastructure since it is deployed on a device that encapsulates the sensing, computing and inferring functionalities, thereby making it a novel contribution to the mobile and pervasive computing domain.

Smartphones används allt mer i arbetslivet. De här har bland annat resulterat i att gränsen mellan arbetsliv och vardagsliv sakta börjat suddas ut. Användningen kan leda till att användare upplever stress, alternativt får en ökad känsla av kontroll. Vi har undersökt vad som påverkar användarens upplevelse av stress respektive kontroll. Utifrån en litteraturstudie kunde vi identifiera tolv olika nyckelpunkter som kan summera användares stress och kontrollpåverkan från smartphones. Genom en intervjuundersökning urskildes sedan fyra stycken olika teman, som kunde delas upp i nyckelpunkter. Nyckelpunkterna från resultatet kunde sedan jämföras med de tolv nyckelpunkterna från litteraturstudien. Det resulterade i att tre nya stress och kontrollpåverkningar kunde identifieras. / Smartphones have with their ability to handle many different types of communication on the go, become a big part of the workplace. This has led to a distortion between home and work life, making the line between them blurry. The result of this is that many users feel an increment in stress, alternatively control. This paper aims to find out what affects the users experience of stress and or control. On the basis of a literature study, twelve key points were identified that could describe users experience of stress and control with smartphones. We could through a interview study make out four themes which also could be divided into key points. The key points from the result where compared to the twelve key points from the literature which led to the result that all of the twelve key points from the literature could be confirmed, as well as four new effects on stress and control could be identified.