Do App Descriptions Matter? Evidence from Mobile App Product Descriptions

Abstract

In mobile Apps markets, the strategic presentation of information cues has the potential to reduce consumer cognitive burden and perceived risk related to purchase quality uncertainty. In the search dominated purchase process, mobile App markets enable developers to deliver an array of App-related attributes and/or marketing messages through the first few lines of product descriptions (producer cues). We evaluate whether extrinsic and intrinsic cues in App descriptions significantly impact App sales and whether they can complement or substitute the cues offered from a product page (market cues). Text-mining techniques are utilized to identify commonly used App product description patterns from 7,376 descriptions of 787 Apps in the 300 paid Games charts over 20 weeks in the Apple App Store. We empirically classify keyword groups presenting extrinsic and intrinsic cues. The classification information is utilized to assess the impact of cues on App sales performance. Our results suggest that extrinsic cues are more strongly related to App rankings than intrinsic ones regardless of the information source, and that consumers utilize market cues as more reliable quality indicators of Apps than producer cues. Extrinsic cues from the markets such as the price of $0.99 and one-point higher review scores improve the sales ranks by 72% and 13% respectively. In addition, we empirically substantiate the complementarities between extrinsic cues in product description and market formats. The extrinsic cues of price ‘promotion’ and user ‘review’ comments in a description improve the sales of low review scored, newly released, and non-hit Apps. The intrinsic cues delivering information on feature ‘update’ and ‘uniqueness’ of an App enhance the sales performance of high-priced and hit Apps. The research findings contribute to the extant literature on product cue utilization by demonstrating how extrinsic/intrinsic cues from multiple sources interact in a competitive marketplace.

Keywords: Mobile Application market, Product description, Intrinsic and Extrinsic cues, Quality signal, Economics of IS

JEL Classification: C23, D82, M20