Communication Needs of Japan and the United States: A Comparative Analysis of the Use of Mobile Information Services

摘要

Mobile marketers are anxious to gain knowledge about the use of mobile services in different cultures and countries. The aim of this research is to construct a method for comparing consumer demand for mobile information services in different countries. We attempted to gain a understanding of the cross-national needs structure through a comparison of use intentions between the United States (at the University of California at Los Angeles) and Japan. Toward this end, we extracted use intention factors from both the locations. The results confirmed the following four factors: the information-intensive factor, the entertainment factor, the low penetration service factor, and the communication tool factor. This study also found that the two countries have different needs characteristics for a certain mobile communication service, i. e., mobile e-mail, and roughly the same needs characteristics for mobile entertainment services and for mobile information services except "radio".