College Students' Smartphone App Brand Engagement: An Empirical Study in the Indian Context.

The purpose of this paper is to comprehend the causes and outcomes of smartphone applications brand retention among young consumers, specially college students belonging to Gen Y in India. The smartphone applications market is witnessing one of the most competitive market conditions today because of expanded rivalry and change. Thus, it is very important for the marketer/app developer to identify variables that influence the consumer decision-making process in downloading and utilizing smartphone applications (app) brands. On this premise, and based on the insights from marketing and information technology literature, this paper attempts to investigate shoppers' decision rules in downloading/utilizing smartphone application by examining the factors that prompt customer brand engagement and the results with regard to smartphone application brands. PLS was used to analyze 232 completed survey responses out of the 650 collected responses, for testing the validity of the proposed relationship. The findings indicated that all the relationships are statistically significant, increasing the robustness of the research framework proposed in the study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]