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Top1.0 Introduction
The relevance of the service sector and of the digital devices, particularly the MMTs, and their concomitant adoption by different categories of enterprises is obsessively on surge (Charoensukmongkol & Sasatanum, 2017). Report from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS, 2015) affirmed that the service sector contributes 52.99 percent of the GDP in the first quarter of 2014, which is the largest in Nigeria; and the telecommunications industry accounted for 27.36 percent of it; whereas, agriculture accounted for 19.65 percent. Similarly, Nigeria is the biggest and the most promising mobile telecommunications market in Africa with over 75 million subscribers and market penetration rate of about 61.53 percent; and 76 percent of internet traffic from mobile devices (https://abbakin.com/mobile-marketing-in-nigeria/; Ekakitie-Emonena & Odanibeh, 2016). Beside the COVID-19 induced movement restriction, scholars (Amirkhanpour et al., 2014; Inegbedion et al., 2019; Ma et al., 2009) suggest that the surge is obvious, because of the affordability of mobile devices and other digital marketing applications that provide opportunities for large and small businesses to regularly advance their interactions, and businesses/marketing processes. Scholars (Lamarre et al., 2012; Shankar et al., 2010; Balasubramanian et al., 2002) consider MMTs and other marketing devices most effective and dynamic, because they involve personalized marketing and ubiquitous interactions within the value chain.
The implementation of MMT is vastly turning a vital marketing communication strategy for most organizations (Leppäniemi & Karjaluoto, 2008; Inegbedan, 2018), given the real-time and cost-effective sharing of contents. In the UK and US, for instance, many consumers are mobile users (Storm et al., 2014); nearly 71 percent of UK consumers buy and sell via mobile applications (Park et al., 2006); and from 2000 to 2008, MMT surged universally to 24 percent, accounting for 4 billion in the last quarter of 2008 (Eze et al., 2019). Similarly, an inquiry shows that global MMT expenditure accounted for 17.96 billion USD and will be multiplied by the end of 2016 (Amirkhanpour et al., 2014). Another study report 90% of firms are core investors in MMT, and approximately 25% of the entire marketing budget is linked to MMT (Sultan et al., 2009). Other studies (e.g Earl & Feeny, 2012) show that SMEs rarely break-even or even make profits if they fail to adopt and implement emerging technology at the right market levels. Hence, the adoption of MMT has become a strategic tool for the survival of both large and small firms (Kim et al., 2008; Harvie, 2010; Eze & Chinedu-Eze 2018), given that it consistently provides level-playing grounds and promotes interactions with clients and allies even outside physical presence (Eze et al., 2019; Nguyen et al., 2015).