Bio

Berk Ataman is an Associate Professor of Marketing at Koç University.

Dr. Ataman’s research focuses on developing quantitative models to support marketing decision making and seeks to help managers better understand how marketing affects performance specifically in the long run. Dr. Ataman received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Management Engineering from Istanbul Technical University and his Ph.D. from Tilburg University. He held research positions at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (2006-2013), Tilburg University (2002-2006), and Istanbul Technical University (1999-2002) prior to joining College of Administrative Sciences and Economics at Koç University. Dr. Ataman’s work has appeared in journals such as Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, Journal of Product and Brand Management, and Social Indicators Research. He serves on the Editorial Board of International Journal of Research in Marketing. His work in Marketing Science is the recipient of the 2009 ERIM Top Academic Article Award, 2008 Citation of Excellence Award, and was a finalist for John D.C. Little Award. Ataman also received the 2008 Emerald/EFMD Outstanding Doctoral Research Award for his research on Managing Brands. He was granted an EUR fellowship and was invited to MSI’s Young Scholars programme.

Title & Abstract

There is an app for that! Unsderstanding the drivers of mobile application downloads.

Since its emergence in 2008, mobile application space has been growing at an astonishing rate. The growth of this market is not surprising at all, as mobile applications offer businesses, big and small, a unique opportunity to connect with the on-the-go consumers of our times. Due to the lucrative business opportunities and low barriers to entry, the mobile application space has become a complex marketplace with a significant number of players. Consequently, only a small portion of mobile applications is able to gain traction with mobile phone users. The low success rate of mobile applications coupled with the developers’ insistence on submitting new applications begs the question what are the most critical drivers of mobile application downloads. To answer this question, we put together a unique data set for about 1000 randomly selected mobile applications in a wide variety of categories downloaded from Apple App Store in US, UK, and Canada. Specifically, we combine transactional and marketing data obtained from a leading mobile analytics company (e.g., number of daily downloads, in-app purchases, prices, features, rankings, updates) with publicly available data (e.g., ratings, reviews, content of updates). Investigating the evolution of various aforementioned factors in driving mobile application downloads during the first year of an application’s existence allows us to add insights to the growing literature on mobile marketing and provide practical implications for mobile application developers.