BUS631: Brand Management

The promotion and popularity of smartphones has contributed to the rapid growth of the tourism mobile platform (TMP) market. According to the statistical report of China Internet Network Information Center, June 2021, the number of online travel booking users in China had reached 367 million, an increase of 24.11 million over the end of 2020, accounting for 36.3% of the global internet users. This indicates that more and more consumers plan and make decisions through TMPs. Meanwhile, with the increasing competition in the industry, various application platforms such as reservation, strategy, and social networking have developed rapidly in a short period of time, providing TMP users with diverse options. Research has shown that the cost of acquiring a new customer is five times that of retaining an old customer. In order to gain sustainable competitive advantage, TMP operators should not only try to attract new users, but also need to retain old users. Therefore, how to retain and cultivate the sustainable adoption of users has become a critical issue for TMP companies and operators.

Previous studies on TMP have mainly focused on the adoption decision of users; comparatively less attention has been paid to the users' post-adoption behavior. Although some scholars have addressed the importance of TMP users' continued use the platform, they have mainly resorted to the expectation-confirmation logic, and predicted users' continued use intention by evaluating their satisfaction with the TMP. This kind of satisfaction based on functional experience (e.g., perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use) deviates from the "cognitive-affect" relationship in psychology. In fact, continued use intention is largely an irrational matter with emotional factors playing an important role therein. With the popularity and promotion of TMP in tourism and daily life, people can not only improve tourism efficiency through functional services provided by TMPs (e.g., searching accommodation, tourism activities, flight and reservation information), but also interact and share with other users on tourism related information. This interactional and altruistic experience provided by TMPs will promote the development of emotional ties between users, which would translates into users' attachment to the platform, i.e., platform attachment. Platform attachment, consisting of the two dimensions of platform dependence and platform identity, have been argued to have significant implications for users' behaviors, particularly in driving users to maintain or strengthen relationships with the platform, and developing the intention to keeping using the platform.

Based on the above discussion and in line with the stimulus–organism–response (SOR) framework, we use user experience (functional experience, social experience and altruistic experience) as stimulus variables (S), platform attachment as organism variables (O), and continued use intention as the response variable (R), to explore the influence mechanism of user experience on TMP users' continued use intention. This paper integrates the user experience theory and the attachment theory, and investigates how the uses' functional, social, and altruistic experience in using a TMP to affect their intention to continue using the TMP through the development of platform dependence and platform identity. This combination of user experience theory and attachment theory helps to enhance our understanding of the mechanism underlying users' TMP continuous using decision. Empirical findings of the paper are also helpful for TMP operators to formulate effective relationship marketing strategies and improve market competitiveness of the TMP. As such, this paper contributes to the literature in both theoretical and practical aspects