Brand in the hand: A cross-market investigation of consumer acceptance of mobile marketing

Given the great potential of developing marketing campaigns delivered via mobile devices and the evolution of near-field communication technologies, this study examines factors influencing consumers’ acceptance of untethered, or mobile, marketing across three influential markets: the United States, China, and Europe. We examine the extent to which the usefulness of mobile information/programs and individual characteristics—namely innovativeness, personal attachment, and risk avoidance—jointly influence attitudes toward mobile marketing, and how the latter influences consumers’ mobile marketing activity across three large and influential markets. We found perceived usefulness, consumer innovativeness, and personal attachment to directly influence attitudes toward mobile marketing in all three markets. In China and Europe, risk avoidance also negatively influences attitudes toward mobile marketing. Marketers seeking to build and maintain customer relationships via mobile platforms should view these individual characteristics as levers brands can push to amplify consumers’ acceptance of mobile marketing.     

Antecedents of mobile app usage among smartphone users

Although mobile apps are already an influential medium in the new media industry as a whole, these apps have received little academic attention within the communication and marketing literature. This study develops and tests a hypothesized model to explain antecedents affecting app usage among smartphone users. The analysis of the structural equation model determined a final model with four significant factors (perceived informative and entertaining usefulness, perceived ease of use, and user review). Cost-effectiveness, a key variable of this study due to the particularity of 99-cent app price, had no influence on app usage. This study not only includes marketing implications but also offers insight into various theoretical applications to the field of mobile communication research by suggesting a conceptual model for the acceptance of mobile apps.     

Feel the VIBE: Examining value-in-the-brand-page-experience and its impact on satisfaction and customer engagement behaviours in mobile social media

A critical issue for marketing managers is how best to orchestrate branded social media consumption experiences via mobile applications. This is important because in a mobile first world, these experiences are perceived to be valuable to consumers which in turn facilitate positive consumer behaviour toward the brand. So far, marketing literature offering managerial guidance on this issue remains limited. To this end, this study investigates for the first-time consumer perceptions of ‘Value-In-The-Brand-Page-Experience’ (VIBE), a multidimensional construct, in an emerging market setting of China. China represents an appropriate contextual condition to study given its high mobile penetration and its integration within consumer's lifestyle. This study further examines the impact of VIBE on customer satisfaction and customer engagement behaviours toward the brand via a survey of 714 Chinese consumers. The results substantiate the VIBE framework which contributes to the sparse conceptual development of value perceptions in mobile social media. Furthermore, it confirms the existence of a value–satisfaction–customer engagement behaviour chain. The findings are managerially relevant and focus on leveraging the components of VIBE. These components act as key mechanisms for unlocking customer satisfaction and customer engagement behaviours for brands in the domain of mobile social media.     

Social media marketing: Who is watching the watchers?

The ready access to and availability of social media has opened up a wealth of data that marketers are leveraging for strategic insight and digital marketing. Yet there is a lack of professional norms regarding the use of social media in marketing and a gap in understanding consumers’ comfort with marketers’ use of their social media data. This study analyzes a census-balanced sample of online adults (n = 751) to identify consumers’ perceptions of using social media data for marketing purposes. The research finds that consumers’ perceived risks and benefits of using social media have a relationship with their comfort with marketers using their publicly available social media data. The research extends the applicability of communication privacy management theory to social media and introduces marketing comfort—a new construct of high importance for future marketing research. Marketing comfort refers to an individual's comfort with the use of information posted publicly on social media for targeted advertising, customer relations, and opinion mining. In the context of the construct development, we find that targeted advertising is the strongest contributing component to marketing comfort, relative to the other two dimensions: opinion mining and customer relations. By understanding what drives consumer comfort with this emerging marketing practice, the research proposes strategies for marketers that can support and mitigate consumers’ concerns so that consumers can maintain trust in marketers’ digital practices.     

New opportunities in social media for ad-restricted alcohol products: The case of ‘Yeni Rakı’

The rapid diffusion and technological evolution experienced in the new format of the Internet, particularly social media, have forced many brands to keep pace with this ongoing process in order to engage with their customers. Social media utilize multiple Internet-based communication platforms, including, but not limited to, blogs and social networking sites. This paper aims to examine how social media can be used to interact with consumers in the case of ad-restricted alcohol products, providing a case study from Turkey. The explored case provides an example of a well-planned, creative campaign that successfully exploits the opportunities provided by interactivity. The analysis of an alcohol product is critical due to the fact that such products face many restrictions, thus calling for a more creative and efficient approach to the design and implementation of social media practices, and their integration into integrated marketing communication (IMC) campaigns. This case will contribute to the articulation of the best ways to shape both business-to-consumer and consumer-to-consumer dialogue and fruitful applications of this new IMC tool.     

Exploring interactive communication using social media

Engaging consumers in interactive marketing communication is instrumental in business–customer relationships building and development. Social media enables consumers to initiate marketing messages and gain growing control in the communication process due to its enhanced interactivity features. This study investigates whether communication between businesses and their social media users is interactive and how interactive it is. It also attempts to determine what types of messages are more likely to result in interactive communication. The findings reveal that businesses are attempting functional interactivity while individual users are increasingly securing a control to achieve contingent interactivity. Businesses are adopting a consumer-centric approach in designing and executing marketing communication messages to achieve interactivity though significant variance is established between businesses as measured by Interactivity Performance Matrix. Challenges remain for businesses as to how to engage their customers by utilizing the interactivity features of social media to facilitate relationships formulation and development.     

Utilizing mobile devices to enrich the learning style of students

As digital technologies evolve in education, business faculty have increased access to an extensive range of mobile devices and online applications to help them inspire students' passion for learning. Adopting new digital approaches to teaching can also enhance the learning style of students who are immersed in the use of digital devices. How can the use of these devices and associated applications (apps) help students broaden the opportunities for a more effective learning experience? In this exploratory article, the authors examine the impact of two mobile apps—Flipboard and Stitcher—on students' learning and engagement with class-assigned marketing materials. Students enjoyed Flipboard more than Stitcher in contributing to the requirements of class work.     

The value of social presence in mobile communications

Texting via mobile devices is used as a primary means for day-to-day communications among an increasing number of consumers and, as a result of this trend, more companies are engaging with consumers and addressing service complaints using social media platforms, such as Facebook. This study addresses the use of two-way mobile texting via Facebook to resolve service complaints with applications from social presence theory. Research shows that marketers’ warm emotions are important in addressing service complaints, yet prior works mainly focus on the significance of human warmth in face-to-face contexts. Therefore, this study uses an experimental design to investigate the value of social presence in mobile texting as a means for providing service recovery. In triangulating the data, we use focus groups in confirmatory analysis. The findings show that social presence cues add human warmth to text messages with respect to two-way communication perceptions, control perceptions, responsiveness perceptions, satisfaction, attitudes, and repurchase intentions. The article concludes with a discussion of the importance of social presence cues in improving customers’ experiences and overall satisfaction.     

Consumers as legitimating agents: How consumer‐citizens challenge marketer legitimacy on social media

Previous research has shown that consumers increasingly challenge the legitimacy of marketers and unsolicited marketing communication in online contexts. Based on a qualitative study, this article examines how and for what reasons consumers challenge marketer legitimacy—the perceived appropriateness of marketers and their activities—in the empirical context of Reddit, a popular social news and community website. The study suggests that consumers challenge or accept marketer legitimacy in online communities based on particular, community and situation specific, legitimacy criteria that reflect and reproduce the values and norms of the community. In doing so, it is argued, consumers play a role as legitimating agents—consumer‐citizens that have the power to confer or deny legitimacy in the context of business‐society relations. Overall, the study advances knowledge in the field of consumer studies in two ways. First, it builds a symbolic interactionist perspective on consumer‐citizens as legitimating agents who enact their active citizenship role in the marketplace by assessing and constructing marketer legitimacy in online communities. Second, it offers an empirically grounded account of how and for what reasons consumer‐citizens challenge or accept the legitimacy of marketers and unsolicited marketing communication in online communities.     

品牌创新传播模型及操作导向研究

新媒体时代,广告主如何在海量信息中使品牌所要传达的信息准确到达目标消费者,并促使其产生反馈？本文围绕这一问题,以市场营销学、传播学、消费者心理学为理论基础,将互联网、终端、内容产品等新兴营销传播工具纳入品牌传播体系,建构以“告知——认知——体验——共享”为核心的“品牌创新传播层级模型”,并提出了差异、整合、互动三大导向性原则,以期为广告主更好地控制品牌信息、提高传播效率提供参考。     

Industry and agency views of social media: Issues implementing dialogic communication

The technologies and culture of social media present issues for organisations implementing dialogic communication. The ubiquity of social media and the dialogic nature of communications in the digital age are raising awareness of the necessity of a total stakeholder approach to integrated communications. Yet, while the Marketing discipline argues that dialogic communication represent communication par excellence, this research finds that implementing a total stakeholder approach to dialogic communication is proving to be extremely elusive for many organisations exploring social media applications. The empirical findings of this research explore how marketing and communications professionals from a diverse range of industry and agency role contexts view social media, and presents issues that organisations face in implementing dialogic communication. It is suggested that these implementation issues inhibit the ability of organisations to move beyond ‘control’ and implement a total stakeholder approach to social media for dialogic communication that can engage with an organisation's stakeholders to gain their support.     

More than meets the eye: The functional components underlying influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is the practice of compensating individuals for posting about a product or service on social media. Influencer marketing is on the rise, and many marketers now plan either to start using influencers or to increase their use of them in their media mixes. Despite such growth, relatively little strategic or academic insight exists that is specific to influencers. In this article, we describe the roots of influencer marketing and the many different types of influencers that now exist. We identify influencers’ three functional components: the audience, the endorser, and the social media manager. We then detail for each of these components the different sources of value influencers potentially offer marketers. We draw on relevant academic research to offer advice about how to leverage each component strategically. We close by describing how the interplay of these functional components makes influencers a potentially powerful—and undervalued—marketing tool.     

Building relationships through dialogic communication: organizations,stakeholders, and computer-mediated communication

Online media are integral to daily life, and while many organizations use them to reach broad audiences, others still appear to be uncomfortable with online media because they do not understand how to maximize their potential to interact effectively with stakeholders. Numerous organizations use online media for one-way communication to disseminate information, despite the affordances of the media platforms for two-way, dialogic communication. This article draws on two dominant interpersonal theories of computer-mediated communication—social information processing theory and the hyperpersonal model—to propose dialogic strategies that organizations can use to improve their online communication with their stakeholders. We illustrate the application of these principles through three stages of relationship building: initiating/experimenting, intensifying, and integrating/bonding. The article integrates the applications within an overall dialogic communication strategy, and provides organizations and practitioners with a model with which they can engage stakeholders with dialogic methods via social media.     

Corporate Use of Social Media: Technology Affordance and External Stakeholder Relations

Business organizations are beginning to recognize the substantial potential of social media for enhancing corporate communications with external stakeholders, including investors, customers, and the general public—all of whom can affect firms’ financial future. Social media applications reach a wide spectrum of external stakeholders, help them express themselves and connect with one another, and engage them in ongoing conversations with the firm. Despite growing interest in this area, there has been limited research on this important topic. Accordingly, we focus on wikis, social networking sites, micro-blogging sites, and video-sharing sites, among many social media applications, and identify their respective beneficial attributes within the context of external communication. In so doing, we illuminate the prominent technical features of the four social media applications and review the existing literature in order to identify how business organizations take advantage of the unique features to facilitate their communicative activities in practice. We ground our analyses in validated conceptual frameworks in the fields of information systems and communication, such as the notion of technology affordances and Hutton’s (1999) framework for public relations. As a result, we suggest the “Eight Affordances” of the four social media applications that help corporate communicators. This study expands the social media and technology affordance literature into the important, yet understudied, external communications field.     

International Advertising Expenditure Trends

From the early 1990s, marketing literature began to feature a number of articles suggesting that integrated marketing communications (IMC) would have a major impact on advertising as we know it, and on client—advertising agency relationships. A counter-view appeared at that time in the literature suggesting that IMC was nothing more than co-ordinated promotion and that many companies had been doing ‘it’ for some considerable time. More recent articles have lamented that the concept has not been embraced by marketing communications specialists and that implementation has proven difficult. A common definition of IMC—and how it differs from traditional advertising, both in philosophy and in implementation—has not evolved despite considerable academic discussion on the subject. This paper reviews the most comprehensive definitions of IMC and the competing paradigms—‘new’ versus ‘nothing new’—and summarises the results of a recent two-part study that compares the perceptions of clients with those of senior ad agency personnel in New Zealand regarding how and in what ways IMC is developing there.     

Channels for search and purchase: Does mobile Internet matter?

Recent industry reports indicate that consumers own four digital devices on an average, and switching devices during shopping is the “new normal.” The addition of mobile Internet as a new channel of search and purchase has spurred the adoption of the digital medium, and easy accessibility of the Internet on multiple devices is influencing shopping patterns. A consumer may prefer some channels for search and others for purchase or use a combination of channels to search and purchase simultaneously. As a new channel, it is unclear 1) whether mobile Internet offers greater search or purchase benefits and 2) what type of products are more suitable for mobile Internet search and purchase. In this study, we develop a framework that describes the factors that drive the use of mobile Internet in a multi-channel environment. We test the framework using survey data from a sample of U.S consumers. The main findings from our study indicate that 1) the choice of channel combinations that include mobile relative to other channel combinations increases with an increase in perceived search convenience of mobile channel. 2) in the digital channel, mobile and desktop differ in their utility along search dimensions. The probability of choosing channel combinations that include mobile increases due to search convenience whereas desktop is attractive due to perceived gains of price comparison search; and 3) mobile Internet search increases for consumers searching for utilitarian products. The insights from this study deepen our understanding of how digital media is used in the search-purchase process and have important managerial implications.     

Understanding the intention to use mobile shopping applications and its influence on price sensitivity

This study employs an extended technology acceptance model (TAM) and the theory of diffusion of innovations (DOI) to understand the intention to use mobile commerce applications for shopping purposes. The variables—perceived enjoyment, perceived risk and personal innovativeness—were added to the original model. The price sensitivity criterion was predicted using the variables—perceived risk, personal innovativeness, satisfaction and the intention to use. An online questionnaire was circulated nationwide through email to verified e-commerce users and a sample of 675 respondents was taken for analysis through structural equation modeling approach. Gender, experience and frequency of using mobile shopping applications were used as moderators for all relationships. Findings of this study reveal that personal innovativeness and perceived risk play a major role in deciding the intention to use mobile shopping applications. Users who are highly innovative and with a higher intention to use mobile shopping applications are less sensitive to price. Various managerial implications including applications to differential pricing, improving adoption pace and segmenting consumers to design marketing strategies are discussed.     

What Advertisers Need to Know about the iYGeneration: An Australian Perspective

A great challenge exists today: how to reach youth (a.k.a. the iYGeneration) who consume multiple media concurrently, who can access information on demand, and who have intertwined virtual social media networks in their lives. Our research finds that Australian youth multi-task and rarely use traditional media, although significant differences between males and females, as well as late tweens and 20-somethings, exist. Technology convergence facilitates two-way dialogue, allowing growing social interactions to occur in their technological environments. Our findings show that in order for marketing communication professionals to effectively communicate with this market, it is crucial to know exactly how the iYGeneration use media, which media they use, and when they use it.     

A global approach to the analysis of user behavior in mobile payment systems in the new electronic environment

Mobile devices and social media have led to a profound revolution of modern society, obliging many companies to reorient their sales systems towards more successful commercial formats (mobile commerce and social commerce). The mobile payment, for instance, as an emerging and supplementary service to these new commercial formats, is now undergoing the adoption process. Mobile payment has long been discussed, but it has not yet reached the usage levels expected by the different mass market players (financial institutions, telephone operators, etc.) in Western societies. The purpose of this paper is to analyze users’ acceptance of mobile payment systems on social networks. In order to explain acceptance, we have integrated trust and perceived risk into the traditional TAM model. To complete this study, we have established the decisive factors of this payment system by analyzing user’s gender, age and experience level. The study was conducted through an online survey among a national panel composed by 2.012 social network users. The results of this research support previous studies and provide alternatives for companies to consolidate this new business model by means of the new technical developments.     

“Don't pretend to be my friend!” When an informal brand communication style backfires on social media

Social media are now essential platforms for marketing communications, and the volume of consumer-brand interactions on these platforms is exploding. Even so, it remains unclear how brands should communicate with consumers to foster relationships and, in particular, to gain their trust. A fundamental decision in this regard is the choice of a communication style, specifically, whether an informal or a formal style should be used in social media communications. In this paper, we investigate how adopting an informal (vs. formal) communication style affects brand trust and demonstrate that using an informal style can either have a positive or negative effect on brand trust, depending on whether consumers are familiar with the brand or not. We further show that these effects occur because consumers expect brands to behave according to social norms, such that the use of an informal style is perceived to be appropriate for familiar brands and inappropriate for unfamiliar ones.