I was collecting a variety of research through articles and academic papers, so I can understand the psychological behavior of potential users, and why users would want to download YOUNIFORM over others as Gen-Z. I read one theoretical article written in 2019 by the LSE Business Review: ‘Using consumer psychology to enhance mobile app recommendations.’
I learned what the ‘involvement’ theory is (in regards to mobile application downloads):
- Existing mobile app recommenders mostly predict users’ download behaviours by mining their behavioural patterns, for example recommendations are made so that users who download app A also download app B. – so for example (IN THEORY), if a user is in the apple app store, they may download the hype beast application, and be referred YOUNIFORM.
- Involvement is an internal state of mind a consumer experiences when choosing a product or a service, and the degree of involvement (high or low) is manifested by the amount of time, effort and consideration expended in the process of information search and product acquisition
- For example:
- in purchases of some durable products with high price tags, consumers are often associated with high involvement and actively search and collect information before purchases
- In contrast, while purchasing consumable, low-cost products (such as groceries, instant coffee, and bubble bath soap)
- consumers are more likely to have low involvement, with few or even no searches and comparisons.
In the case of mobile apps, different apps have different abilities to elicit involvement due to their unique characteristics such as complexity, perceived risk, emotional appeal, and hedonic value.
In order to effectively locate the apps that a user would be interested in downloading, identifying the user’s internal involvement state and taking it into consideration in the recommendations is indeed helpful.
The involvement theory suggests that it is feasible to infer it from the person’s browsing behaviours preceding downloads – In the case of mobile apps, information search before an app download is embodied in users’ browsing behaviours on a mobile app platform.
A user who has high involvement with a mobile app category may browse many apps in that category to make comparisons before downloading one, while on the other hand, a user who has low involvement with an app category may do little or even no browsing before downloading an app in that category.
Therefore, the intensity of browsing behaviours preceding a download is affected by a user’s involvement state with the download, and thus can be used to learn it.
This theory can back my reasoning of why those already involved in this community or subculture who are high involvement users would download YOUNIFORM as a recommendation, and those who are low involvement can be changed if we use this theory to obtain the upper hand and influence them.