THE EFFECT OF CONSUMER CONFUSION PRONENESS ON WORD OF MOUTH, TRUST, AND CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

Smartphone is highly popular device in Indonesia. However, development of smartphone technology and fierce competition among smartphone manufactures, it leads consumers find difficulty to make purchase decision and they are stuck in the confusion. This situation can be happened because in the competitive environment there is decreasing inter-brands different so that it is hard for the consumers to differentiate among products. Moreover, consumers experience over choices products that leads too much and unclear information about the products. These conditions are known as consumer confusion phenomenon. The consumer confusion becomes a problem that should be dealt with both consumers and marketers. This present research was conducted to examine consumers’ general tendency to become confused and its effect on word of mouth, trust and consumer satisfaction. Moreover this present research involved 150 university students as respondents who had experience in using or buying smartphone. Then, nine hypotheses were tested using multiple regression analyses. So from the result, it indicates that two of the three consumer confusion dimensions (i.e. similarity and overload confusion) have significant negative impcat on word of mouth, trust and consumer satisfaction. Mean while, the rest dimension (ambiguity confusion) has insignificant impact on three dependent variables. The findings have implication for management in order to use the confusion dimension to assess their customer and to make good decisions regarding the customer’s perception towards their products