Exploring drivers of success in push-type mobile marketing

Abstract

Technological innovations, when they reach a critical threshold level of penetration, may cause tremendous impact on various aspects of daily life. As it was the case in color TV, landline telephone, and PC-based Internet, mobile technology also had a similar effect and caused fundamental shifts in the communication patterns, the temporal and spatial constraints, and the expectations of people. The mobile medium cannot be conceived as an extension to the PC-based wired Internet because it has a unique essence of its own. When a new technology represents such a discontinuity in the marketplace it draws mounting interest from both academic and business circles. Research in mobile marketing is rapidly growing, but the accumulated academic knowledge is fairly fragmented and inconsistent. The relevant body of literature lacks a comprehensive framework that adequately explains and predicts consumers’ experience through mobile advertising and mobile service encounters, especially in push-type mobile marketing campaigns. Furthermore, there exist few, if any, theories that this new prospering research stream can call its own. The purpose of this dissertation is to contribute to the understanding of central theoretical and pragmatic issues related to the application of push-type mobile marketing in consumer markets through critically assessing the state of the art, and exploring drivers of success in push-type mobile marketing via a field experiment.