THE EFFECTS OF RELATIONAL BONDS ON BRANDED APPS USE

摘要

This study adopts the perspective of relational bonds and relationship quality to attempt to uncover why consumers exhibit willingness to download and use the branded APPs on their smart devices. Using sporty branded APPs as the context, this study collected empirical observations to test the proposed research model with SEM technique. The results showed that: (1) structural bonds between the brand holder and consumers have positive impact on their relationship quality (standardized path: 0.733, p < 0.001), however, financial bonds and social bonds fail to significantly generate positive effects toward the relationship quality in the sporty branding industry; (2) the relationship quality between brand holders and consumers has positive effect on the branded APPs download intention (standardized path: 0.462, p<0.001); (3) The download intention does in turn positively lead to the branded APPs use (standardized path: 0.202, p<0.05 *). Detailed implications and recommendations are finally discussed.