Abstract
The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate and reflect upon the extant literature on mobile marketing with a view of identifying contributions, gaps and avenues for future research. The review is based on more than two hundred articles published in leading journals and conference proceedings. We first discuss key areas that have already attracted the attention of researchers, such as consumer acceptance in mmarketing and location-sensitive mobile marketing. We then focus on the emerging area of ubiquitous marketing and illustrate how mobile and wireless devices and technologies can become the enablers of meaningful dialogues between customers and marketers on an omnipresent basis. Ubiquitous marketing could be the next frontier in electronic commerce and customer relationship management.
TopCurrent M-Marketing Research
We have obtained our pool of literature on which the review was based by querying Business Source Premier, one of the most well-known academic electronic text databases and M-lit, the first online bibliographical database dedicated to mobile business literature. Additional research from other resources was added to the EBSCO and M-lit results if a topic was deemed to be under-studied based solely on these references.
Our queries have produced over 400 publications from scholarly journals and conference proceedings, which, after initial analysis and screening, have produced a database of two hundred and nine articles related to m-marketing. In what follows, we use the review of this literature as a basis for understanding the current status and future prospects of m-marketing research. It must be noted that, for reasons of brevity, we could not of course include a review of all 207 papers in this chapter. Instead, we have chosen to focus on the most representative research areas and include the complete reference list in the Bibliography on Mobile Marketing that is contained at the Appendix of this chapter. The interested reader can further consult the freely available academic database of mobile literature at www.m-lit.org with over 1,000 references can help the reader to elaborate more on specific topics of m-commerce.
It is interesting to note that m-marketing research seems to be gaining interest and popularity, since papers per year are increasing (Figure 1), while empirical papers dominate the research agenda in recent years. Please note that 2008 papers were quantified since October 1st.
Figure 1. m-Marketing research per year
M-advertising, mobile services and applications diffusion and acceptance are the main topics that researchers have focused upon. However, other topics, such as viral marketing and conducting research via wireless devices, are still relatively unexplored (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Topics researched under the umbrella of m-marketing
Key Terms in this Chapter
Consumer Attitude: A lasting general evaluation of something; a state of mind or a feeling
Context-Aware Marketing: Marketing that is location-, time- and consumer profile-specific Ubiquitous Marketing: This type of marketing is sensing and responding not only to who the customer is, but where she is and what she is doing with transparent and undisruptive approaches
Mobile Services: In this context m-services are perceived as all non-voice services afforded through mobile networks, except for interpersonal SMS exchanges, that the end users can employ whilst mobile
Purchase Intention: An individual’s conscious plan to make an effort to purchase a brand
Permission-Based Marketing: Prospect-initiated communication followed by the possibility of an active two-way exchange
Mobile advertising: A paid form of context-sensitive personal communication from an identifiable source, designed to persuade the receiver to take some action, either in real time via the mobile device or in the future.