Effects of weather on financial activities in mobile platforms

Abstract

Mobile technology is evolving, and high adoption rate on mobile devices is expanding the range of consumer behavior and changing lifestyles. Particularly, industry and academia have tested and studied various strategies for better understanding on consumers’ move from offline to online financial activities. Meanwhile, the weather factors have been used in different fields because they induce changes in the behaviors of consumers, though the weather factors are one of the most overlooked aspects of explaining consumer retailing. Therefore, we combine mobile application streaming data with weather data to observe consumers' mobile financial activity patterns based on weather factors. Furthermore, we observe interactions with SNS activities that serve an information-sharing function. We divide financial applications into general financial applications and investment financial applications, and confirm the weather effect, respectively. Interesting results are found for both types of financial applications. Our study provides implications about marketing strategies and marketing usability via SNS depending on weather factors. We also stress the role of weather as a major external variable during contextual targeting.