Telecommunication service choice and use among migrants: The case of German-Turkish consumers

The present article proposes to extend popular psychological frameworks explaining consumer responses to telecommunication device and service offerings by determinants which are geared towards buyers with a migration background. Such potential factors are the strength of identification of migrants with their country of origin (COO) and their country of residence (COR). This general notion is substantiated for German-Turks by analyzing relationships between their strength of COO and COR identifications and the assessment of the purchase relevance of two attributes of mobile communication device and contract offerings as well as the use intensity of three telecommunication services. In a sample of 291 German-Turks, the migrants' strength of identification with Turkey and Germany, respectively each have a significant separate main and a joint interaction effect on the relevance subjects attribute to brand aspects in mobile service and phone contract buying decisions. The impact of each of the two national identification dimensions on felt buying relevance of price-value attributes of mobile communication offerings is also statistically significant, but materially less important. COO and COR identifications emerge with significantly positive prediction weights in capturing variance in the extent to which German-Turks use innovative supplementary mobile data services. The findings have implications for marketing mobile devices, voice calling and mobile data services to migrant consumers.