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Stickiness formation among mobile apps of different social levels: multigroup analysis using the cognitive–affective–conative framework

“…Previous research has shown that most people use social media to fulfill intrinsic purposes (Whiting and Williams, 2013). With social media affordances incorporated, purely taskoriented apps have a higher social level and can meet more hedonic needs (Caraway et al, 2017;Fu et al, 2019), which changes the properties of these apps, and the effects of perceived value in these apps may also change. Thus, we propose the following hypothesis.…”

“…These services promote user engagement, and social commerce presents stronger stickiness than traditional e-commerce (Lin et al, 2019). Many other task-oriented apps, such as transactional, photo and music apps, also incorporate social media affordances (Fu et al, 2019).…”

“…Although social media affordances can facilitate users' social activities in an app, incorporating them into task-oriented apps sometimes fails to strengthen stickiness (Fu et al, 2019). For example, sharing with friends comments on a favorite song in a music app sounds interesting (e.g., NetEase Cloud Music), while posting an update on buying a hamburger in a transaction app seems unattractive (e.g., Ali Pay's abortive attempt).…”

“…The few previous studies on mobile app stickiness only considered positive predictors and never examined the influence of incorporated social affordances (Hsu and Lin, 2016;Martinez and McAndrews, 2021;Nandi et al, 2021), while some studies that concerned the "go social" strategy were limited to online commercial and financial services (Caraway et al, 2017;Fan et al, 2021). Some studies on social functions in mobile apps have provided only qualitative or descriptive findings (Acker and Murthy, 2020;Caraway et al, 2017;Fu et al, 2019).…”

“…To answer the first research question, we proposed and examined a stickiness formation model using the cognitive-affective-conative framework, which functions as a major theory for understanding attitude and behavior (Hilgard, 1980;Kim and Chen, 2021). As social media affordances increase privacy concerns (Pentina et al, 2016), we examined the effect of perceived privacy risk (PPR) and regarded trust as a key component of attitude; as social media affordances bring entertaining experiences (Caraway et al, 2017), we treated perceived hedonic value (PHV) as an equally important factor with perceived utilitarian value (PUV); as social media affordances promote user engagement (Lin et al, 2019), we examined how previous personal investment (PI) influenced future stickiness; as social media affordances facilitate inapp social activities (Fu et al, 2019), we examined the effect of subjective norm (SN).…”