Page 70 - Azerbaijan State University of Economics

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

BA – Brand Awareness; SBI- Symbolic Brand Image; HM – Hedonic Motivation;
HT – Habit; PV – Price Value; SI – Social Influence; USE – Actual Usage.
Source: own editing.

Researchers began to use gender as a moderating variable after the introduction of
the extended version of the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology.
The influence of gender on the formulation of behavioral intention and usage was
deeply analyzed in Portugal (Rita, Oliveira, Estorninho, & Moro, 2018), in Iraq
(Ameen & Willis, 2018), as well as in a cross-national study (Ameen et al., 2018)
about the UAE and Jordan smartphone owners. The purpose of studies related to the
Middle East was to determine and explain the reasons for the gender gap. The study
from Portugal (Rita et al., 2018) focused on understanding the influence of the
UTAUT2 with perceived value indicators on mobile service adoption with the
consideration of the moderating effect of age and gender.

CONCEPTUAL MODEL / HYPOTHESES DEVELOPMENT

The study background was built on the assumptions and indicators regarding
UTAUT2 as well as brand awareness and symbolic brand image (See Figure 1). In
addition to the mediating role of gender, special attention was paid to the
relationship between variables. The proposed model is illustrated in Figure 1.

BRAND AWARENESS

Brand is one of the essential indicators defining customers’ choice of smartphones
(Jamalova & Constantinovits, 2020; Sun et al., 2017). The author agrees with the
definition of brand awareness which states that it is the “ability to identify the brand
under different conditions”(as cited in Keller, 1993, p. 3). In marketing theory, it
was usually widely examined from the brand equity aspect (Keller, 1993). Previous
studies related to the smartphone market neither measured the influence of brand
awareness on the social influence and usage behavior, nor the moderating effect of
gender in this relationship. However, brand awareness was examined from
smartphone advertising (Martins, Costa, Oliveira, Gonçalves, & Branco, 2019),
brand equity (Huang & Shih, 2017) and, trust identification (Lestari, Nasib,
Chaniago, Azzahra, & Effendi, 2019) aspects.

H1. The gender of respondents moderates the relationship between social influence
and smartphone brand awareness.

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