Assessment of country-of-origin-related and -neutral elements of mobile communication service offers: An empirical study of consumers with a Turkish migration background in Germany

Due to more than three million people in Germany with a Turkish migration background country-of-origin (COO)-sensitive, designs of offers directed at this customer segment have been implemented by various corporations and discussed in the management literature for quite a while. Unfortunately, to date most publications have a weak empirical foundation and refrain from simultaneously investigating preference effects of several country-of-origin-sensitive and -neutral offer characteristics among Turkish migrants living in Germany. Therefore, the present paper explores the relative impacts of three COO-sensitive offer characteristics and one COO-neutral attribute of bundled mobile communication offers on preference statements derived from a conjoint-analysis of questionnaire responses of 249 consumers in Germany with Turkish roots. The results suggest that for the offering category in question a COO-neutral feature (cell phone type/brand) shapes the preferences of Turkish migrants almost to the same extent as the three remaining price- and communication-related characteristics investigated. Furthermore, we found that Turkish consumers in Germany encompass four subsegments with distinct preferences with respect to the design of mobile communication offerings. The members of these subsegments in turn differ primarily in terms of their age and gender structures as well as their level of accommodation to the German culture.