User Motivation and Acceptance of Mobile Services in Nigeria

Introduction

International Telecommunication Union report showed that Nigeria still ranked 15^th in Africa and 143^rd out of the 176 countries surveyed in the adoption of ICT (ITU, 2017). The development of mobile telecommunication network stimulates economic growth (Gruber and Koutroupis, 2011). In enabling economic growth, user acceptance is crucial to the success of any product or service, but is very difficult to predict. According to Page (2006) in a competitive response survey, which was carried to measure key performance indicators for competitive response policies, telecom professionals believed the biggest opportunities was in increasing their firm’s competitiveness and the biggest opportunity area was in new product development with 72% of affirmative responses. The second most popular way to increase competitiveness was to better understand the customer needs, with 65% of responses. However, another report by Product Development and Management Association (PDMA), the telecom industry ranks in the bottom third when it comes to implementing formal processes and best practices for developing innovative new services and products. Telecom companies try to innovate in unsystematic ways that make it difficult to understand customer needs; hence valuable resources are dedicated in developing new products and services which fail in the marketplace. One important reason for failure is that it is difficult to assess the needs of users and their willingness to use the service in advance.

Mobile Services are defined as digital and data communication services accessed via wireless networks through any type of mobile devices (Lu, Liu, Yu and Wang, 2008). Researchers have divided mobile services into four broad categories ranging from communication service, information services, entertainment services and transaction services (Al- Debie & Al-Lozi, 2014; Nikou, 2013, Cheng& Sun, 2012).

Research has been carried out extensively on the acceptance of mobile services Leong, Ooi, Chong& Lin, 2013; Al- Debie & Al-Lozi, 2014). However, a clear gap has been identified on the acceptance of mobile services in Nigeria. There is need to know factors that influence consumers in the existing social environment of Nigerian Communities. Hence the Objective of this study are listed as follows

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  To establish the key factors that motivate individuals to use different mobile services in the Nigerian GSM Market

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  To establish the underlying factors that influence the acceptance of new services by users in the GSM market

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  To know how the use and acceptance factors relate to the demographic characteristics of users of the GSM Market

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  To establish the relationship between user acceptance factors by different adopter groups