Abstract :
Smartphone is highly popular device in Indonesia. However,
development of smartphone technology and fierce competition among smartphone
manufactures, it leads consumers find difficulty to make purchase decision and
they are stuck in the confusion. This situation can be happened because in the
competitive environment there is decreasing inter-brands different so that it is
hard for the consumers to differentiate among products. Moreover, consumers
experience over choices products that leads too much and unclear information
about the products. These conditions are known as consumer confusion
phenomenon. The consumer confusion becomes a problem that should be dealt
with both consumers and marketers.
This present research was conducted to examine consumers? general
tendency to become confused and its effect on word of mouth, trust and consumer satisfaction. Moreover this present research involved 150 university students as
respondents who had experience in using or buying smartphone. Then, nine
hypotheses were tested using multiple regression analyses. So from the result, it
indicates that two of the three consumer confusion dimensions (i.e. similarity and
overload confusion) have significant negative impcat on word of mouth, trust and
consumer satisfaction. Mean while, the rest dimension (ambiguity confusion) has
insignificant impact on three dependent variables. The findings have implication
for management in order to use the confusion dimension to assess their customer
and to make good decisions regarding the customer?s perception towards their
products.