The effect of a benevolent mobile app on brand consideration, and enforcement methods for improved measurement

This thesis covers two studies. The first study sets out to determine whether benevolent apps are effective. Benevolent apps, are created to offer useful information to consumers or otherwise help them with decision-making, instead of attempting to generate sales or promote special deals. In this first study, I analyze the effect of a benevolent app on the brand consideration of the company that creates the benevolent app. Specifically, I build Android and iOS benevolent apps for Suruga Bank, and evaluate Suruga's brand consideration among the respondents both Pre and Post the app experience. I introduce several software enforcement to ensure that each respondent goes through the entire app experience. I detail the design and implementation of the experiment, from the software point of view, and present the significant results from data analysis of a 1500-user data base. In this study, I demonstrate that benevolent apps are in fact more effective at improving brand consideration when compared to traditional media advertisements like magazines. The second study sets up enforcement and methodology for serving video in an upcoming study to evaluate the effect of story-telling on brand consideration.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2015

Author dc:creator

• Wekesa, Beneah Kombe

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Glen L. Urban.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/100617

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/100617