Influence of Product Attributes on Mobile Phone preference among university students: A Case of Undergraduate students

This paper examines the influence of product attributes on mobile phone preference among undergraduate university students. This paper presents a study that explores whether the varied product or brand attributes of mobile phones influence the students’ decision making and empirically evaluates their preferences in design, different colour themes and packaging. A descriptive research design was used for this study. The study used stratified random sampling method to select the elements of the population. The students were stratified according to their majors. Every third student from the majors to be studied was considered for the study. To collect primary data, questionnaires were administered to the respondents during classes of their majors. Data was analyzed using the SPSS software and results were presented in figures and tables. The descriptive statistics used were percentages and mean. The study indicates that varying the product attributes’ has an influence on the undergraduate students’ preferences on mobile phones. Various aspects of product and brand attributes were considered such as color themes, visible name labels, and mobile phone with variety of models, packaging for safety, degree of awareness on safety issues, look and design of the phone. Finding of this study indicates that these attributes have a significant influence on the student’s preference of mobile phone. Although, most of the respondents would not consider these attributes to be important when making the decision of which mobile phone to purchase. This paper concludes that students are at position to differentiate between the mobile phone offerings hence they decide which best suits their needs using the attributes.