Smart City: Studying Smartphone Application Functions with City Marketing Goals Based on Consumer Behavior of Generation Z in Hungary

Abstract

Many cities in Hungary have an application specially developed for smartphones that try to satisfy both the needs of tourists and local residents. These "products" are based on different objectives of city marketing and destination marketing: their goal is to make shorter or longer stays more comfortable, provide faster and more personalized information, help consumers to turn their offline experiences into online experience sharing and to provide a platform for two-way communication between local and touristic consumers. In addition to the marketing literature review related to smartphones and local tourism experiences, this paper presents the results of a quantitative questionnaire focusing on the needs of Generation Z concerning application functions. Based on the quantitative results, the members of Generation Z are classified into three main groups with the k-means cluster analysis. Among the groups, there are significant differences between the functional requirements of city marketing applications, and according to the size of the groups three main application types and two main ways of software development can be distinguished. The results also show that there are four main group of functions and connected to the different clusters application functions appear together in the needs of consumers. However, the analysis and comparison of the related data together show also that there are only small differences concerning demographic and device-usage variables between the groups defined by the k-means cluster analysis, and this requires more research methods to be conducted in the future based on the results of this exploratory survey research.