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

Abstract

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.