Consumer confusion is a phenomena when the consumer experiencing several confusion problems when she/he should to purchase products/services. Usually, consumer will do a strategy to coping the confusion, that strategy is known as Confusion Reduction Strategy. The conventional ways usually taken by the consumer to reduce the confusion are, such as: Asking for product recommendation to close relatives, seeking for an additional product information on the internet and so on. However, suggestions and recommendations from conventional sources obtained by the consumer, sometimes are not always accurate (not objective) and time consuming (inefficient). Therefore, this research proposes a Decision Support System (DSS) application to cope with the confusion. In this study, the comparison results between conventional methods (such as: Asking advice to close relatives or seeking for an additional information on the internet) with the proposed method (the DSS) were presented. In addition, another implication of this study is to get the factors that causing consumer confusion in case of smartphone purchases. This research used mixed-method approach, implemented through interview and survey. Research samples were 136 potential smartphone buyers which are converted to 27 smartphone buyers; brand image is the main source of consumer confusion (mean 3.98, std. dev 0.86), followed by proliferation of brands, services and models of smartphone products (mean 3.89, std. dev 0.82). Respondents often use Word of Mouth (WoM) communication as main source of information to reduce the confusion, results of 16 from 27 transactions were contributed from WoM. DSS application contributed only 2 of 27 smartphone transactions. Further research for the development of mobile based DSS application as an alternative conventional CRS needs to be conducted, because of the potential success of static desktop based DSS application in reducing potential consumer confusion especially for value oriented buyers.
The combination about innovation arts, technology, marketing, and ideas among mobile (smart) phones and notebook computers, revolutionary has led to the birth of a handheld device called as the Tablet PCs. Where, the Tablet PCs was a product that transforming from the minimization of notebook computer. In other words, it can be said as a handheld device that has an 'almost' similar performance as a notebook computer but has a more compact and smaller size dimension than the notebook computers and has a bigger dimension than the smart-phones also. The problem is there were so many variations of Tablet PCs products on the market. Therefore, the question often arises about the Tablet PCs is, "which one the most-suitable product for my purposes"? In this study modeled a simulation process for Tablet PCs selection using the eight domains of weighting criteria. Which from our perspective these eight domains of weighting criteria are an 'objective' measurement for assessing the Tablet PCs products. As a decision support tool that implementing a method of Multi-Attribute Decision Making (MADM) technique using Weighted-Product (WP) algorithm approach, where 5706 Robertus Nugroho Perwiro Atmojo et al. WP serves a means to give product recommendations to the users about the most-suitable products for them based on priority ranking mechanism.
Nowadays, choosing the most suitable smartphone product is not an easy matter. A large number of product brands, technology features are offered, and unobjective product recommendation from others could make customers more difficult to choose. Therefore, this study proposed a single-user model of Decision Support System application based on Fuzzy Simple Additive Weighting algorithm. It is purposed to facilitate customers to narrow down the set of smartphone product alternatives into several recommendations.
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