Value-Based Analysis of Mobile Tagging

Introduction

Improvements in technology in both communication infrastructure and client devices provide new forms and environments for marketing where two terms “ubiquity” and “convergence” surface as the most important concepts. A single medium for reaching information is being overlooked and multiple environments where information is multiplied and conveniently reached are being sought through. Watson et al. (2002) defined this transformation as the emerging era of u-commerce, where u stands for ubiquitous, unique, universal, and unison. These developments gave birth to a new kind of consumer who acts on multiple channels with timeless needs. Wind and Mahajan (2002) used the metaphor of centaur of the Greek mythology to draw a profile for this new type of consumer constituency. “They are like centaurs, half human and half horse, running with the rapid feet of new technology, yet carrying the same ancient and unpredictable human heart” (Wind & Mahajan, 2002, p. 65). Since marketing is about understanding, communicating with, and delivering value to the consumer constituency, marketers will have to adapt to this change and leverage ubiquitous networks to create a pervasive presence alongside their customers.

Based on its inherent characteristics, the mobile channel has emerged as the enabling medium for the u-commerce era. Consequently, academic circles have reached to a consensus on the significance of the impact of mobile technology on the universe of marketing (Balasubramanian et al., 2002; Barnes, 2002a; Mort & Drennan, 2002; Shugan, 2004; Steinbock, 2006; Sultan & Rohm, 2005; Watson et al., 2002). In order to widespread the effects of the mobile channel on marketing, numerous applications have been evolved. Prior academic research in mobile marketing have examined consumer side of various types of mobile applications including location-based services (Barnes, 2003a, 2003b; Kumar & Stokkeland, 2003; Rao & Minakakis, 2003), mobile games (Kleijnen, Ruyter, & Wetzels, 2004; Salo & Karjaluoto, 2007), mobile coupons (Kondo & Nakahara, 2007), text-messages (Rettie, Grandcolas, & Deakins, 2005), mobile multimedia services (Pagani, 2004), text-to-screen mobile marketing (Dolian, 2008), SMS voting (Becker, 2007), vehicular mobile commerce applications (Varshney, 2005), mobile TV (Bayartsaikhan et al., 2007), mobile banking (Laukkanen, 2005; Luarn & Lin, 2005), mobile payments (Chen, 2008; Ondrus & Pigneur, 2006), mobile tickets (Bauer et al., 2007) and wireless application protocol (Barnes, 2002b; Bertelè, Rangone, & Renga, 2002). One of the recently evolving mobile applications is mobile tagging, which is basically an application that links the real world with the digital world. The accumulated academic knowledge on mobile marketing lacks any consumer-centric information about this novel phenomenon. This paper aims to address this issue and contribute to the understanding of theoretical and practical issues related with the use of mobile tagging in consumer markets. In particular, 1) the enabling technology will be defined, 2) a variety of applications that can be powered by mobile tagging will be presented, and 3) consumer-centric value propositions of mobile tagging phenomenon will be discussed.