Page 68 - Azerbaijan State University of Economics

THE JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC SCIENCES: THEORY AND PRACTICE, V.78, # 1, 2021, pp. 66-85

LITERATURE REVIEW
THE EXTENSION OF THE UNIFIED THEORY OF ACCEPTANCE AND
USE OF TECHNOLOGY

The rapid development of technology caused the emergence of new technology-
related concepts. During this period, models dealing with human and technology
interaction become more popular (Tarhini, Arachchilage, Masa’deh, & Abbasi,
2015) in the early 1980s. Each of the offered models (i.e., technology acceptance
model, theory of reasoned action, innovation diffusion theory, and others) had its
strengths and weaknesses. Mostly the models (eg. TAM, TRA, UTAUT) were
focused on the organizational circumstances of adoption (Davis, 1989; Sheppard,
Hartwick, & Warshaw, 1988; Venkatesh, Morris, Davis, & Davis, 2003).
Considering that technology sales in the business-to-customer field were increasing
rapidly, there was a big gap in analyzing the behavior of consumers. Therefore,
Venkatesh et. al. (Venkatesh et al., 2003; Venkatesh, Thong, & Xu, 2012) offered a
new model for analyzing behavior towards technological products that was built on
the review of the most famous theories regarding technology adoption.

The extended version of the model (Venkatesh et al., 2012) that is aimed to focus on
consumer electronics includes three new variables. These variables are hedonic
motivation, price value, and habit. Moreover, the authors emphasize the influence of
age, gender, and experience on the formulation of actual use (Venkatesh et al., 2003,
2012). However, the influence of moderation is rarely examined, because its
implementation complicates calculation (Tamilmani, Rana, & Dwivedi, 2017).

BRAND AWARENESS AND SYMBOLIC BRAND IMAGE IN SMARTPHONE
MARKET

Based on the previous studies in this field, the author agrees that attitude towards
smartphone’s brand might highly influence customers’ choice (Jamalova &
Constantinovits, 2020). This was the main reason for involving marketing-related
variables in the model. The studies conducted by other scholars (Filieri et al., 2019;
Liang, Lai, Hsu, & Chiu, 2018) also support this notion.

Apart from brand awareness, previous studies in the field (Jamalova, 2020;
Jamalova & Constantinovits, 2020) also illustrated the importance of symbolic
brand image. This was supported by the importance of symbolic benefits for
handsets users (Liang et al., 2018; Sun, Zheng, Su, & Keller, 2017).

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