Consumer Behaviour - Internet of Sharing Things - Thailand

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Shortly, Thai people are open in accepting new trends; yet adoring traditional values and beliefs in social hierarchy and personal relationships with self-reliance and ties to families and their social groups with strong ego orientation. New changes in individualistic behaviors are captured in new generations.

Description of emerging trend – Internet of Sharing Things

Internet of Sharing Things is listed in the top trends for upcoming moments allowing the global asset sharing being “spontaneous, fun, useful, profitable, and more”. Development of smart connectivity such as Wifi or 4G-LTE wireless leads to evolutions of internet-accessed information sharing (Gubbi, Buyya, Marusic and Palaniswami, 2013). This kind of revolution interconnects people at an “unprecedented” speed and scale by which, in business, people show off changes in consumption behavior that switches directions and strategies of firms. IoT creates clusters of things being able to interact and communicate within smart environment among people that facilitates the concept of “anything – anywhere – anytime” (Figure 2). Despite revolution of Internet and Internet users, the serious concept and market adoption of full IoT version is predicted to consume 5 – 10 years (Gubbi, et al., 2013). Internet sharing does not involve features of population or cultural features; however, adopters are in different paradigms of time and thoughts and infrastructure of each country is various that times is taken to converge informatics forms globally into a “genuine IoT”.

Figure 2: Internet of Things – sharing data and information

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Source: ‘Internet of things: a vision, architectural elements and future directions’, Fig.1, p. 1647 (Gubbi, Buyya, Marusic and Palaniswami, 2013)

IoT is supposed to bring up ‘connectedness’ in lives for consumers through digital connectivity of information, more intelligent home and city life with efficient and secured management. GSM Association (2014) has found out five features of IoT affecting consumers, firms and society as in Table 1.

Table 1: Five distinctive features of Internet of Sharing Things

IoT will enable life-enhancing services

- The IoT can enable the next wave of life-enhancing services across several fundamental sectors of economy through smart connectedness

- Unlocking chances to provide life-enhancing services

- Boosting productivity for firms

Distribution models for IoT service are often global

- Meeting the needs of customers may require global distribution models and consistent global services

IoT is employing innovative new commercial models

- IoT presents an opportunity for new commercial models to support mass global deployments

- Mobile operators facilitate B2B2C model

New capabilities are being developed for IoT applications

- The majority of revenue is derived from the provision of value added services and operators are building new capabilities to address these new service areas.

Differing demands on the mobile network

- Device and application behavior will place new and varying demands on mobile networks

Source: Adapted to GSM Association (2014)

Description of Consumer behavior theory

Consumer behavior is constructed by three groups of personal, psychological and social factors (Kotler and Keller, 2006). Personal group covers demographic factors of age, life expectancy, education background, profession, income condition, lifestyle and personality that is supposed to be affected by cultural surroundings. Psychological factors reflect complex impacts on consumption behavior with motivation (from consumers and firms), perceptions, belief and attitudes; and social factors including reference peers, groups, family, social status, etc. which are direct reflection of types of cultural framework.

Figure 3: Model of Goal-Directed Behavior

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Source: Bagozzi, Gurhan-Canli and Priester, 2002

Deriving from needs and wants, customers have specific intentions in conducting their purchasing based on their desires to achieve perceived goals in consumption. Attitudes, emotions and subjective norms that are affected by three above groups of factors construct consumers’ desires under perceived behavioral controls (Bagozzi, Gurhan-Canli and Priester, 2002) (Figure 3).

A set of actions to apply Internet of Sharing Things into Thailand

Consumers, under the impact of cultural surrounding developing different reflections under personal, psychological and social factors, construct unique features of buying goal-directed attitude and preferences, i.e. unique buying responses to specific marketing stimuli. Under marketing stimuli, consumers create their black boxes including buying characteristics and decision processes that marketers and firms must extract information from those to predict appropriate responses and desires from customers (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Model of Consumer behavior

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Source: “Principles of Marketing’, Fig. 5.1, p. 135 (Kotler and Armstrong, 2012)

In considering Figure 3 and Figure 4, buyer’s characteristics are formulated in forms of influential attitudes, subjective norms, emotions and they are embedded into decision process to achieve buying desires under control of perceived consumer behavior which are supposed to be constructed by factors of personal, psychological and social. Culturally, Thai people are open in accepting new trends; yet adoring traditional values and beliefs in social hierarchy and personal relationships with self-reliance and ties to families and their social groups; and new changes in individualistic behaviors are captured in new generations as reviewed above.

Technologically, Thailand is the country with high amount