The Impact of Gender and Age on Consumer Responsiveness to Permission-Based Mobile Advertising

Introduction

Literature on mobile marketing has grown steadily during the last five years, but still the study of mobile marketing is in its infancy. Even the term “mobile marketing” has not yet gained universally accepted definition (Leppäniemi & Karjaluoto, 2006). In short, mobile marketing refers to the use of a mobile media, as a means of marketing communications (Leppäniemi & Karjaluoto, 2006). Practitioners have defined mobile marketing as “The use of wireless media as an integrated content delivery and direct response vehicle within a crossmedia or stand-alone marketing communications program” (Mobile Marketing Association, 2008, p. 22). Thus, mobile marketing is a term used to describe marketing on or with a mobile device. By the same token, it is worth noting that the term “mobile advertising” is used to describe advertisements communicated to the consumer/target via a mobile handset. These advertisements include for example mobile web banners, full screen interstitials appearing while mobile web pages are loadings, SMS and MMS ads, and mobile in-game ads (Mobile Marketing Association, 2008). In our study we concentrate on SMS advertising, which is still dominating the mobile marketing landscape in western markets.

A considerable number of the publications on mobile marketing have examined consumer attitudes to mobile marketing (Haghirian & Madlberger, 2004; Leung & Cheung, 2004; Tsang, Ho, & Liang, 2004) and acceptance of mobile marketing (Bauer et al., 2005; Leppäniemi & Karjaluoto, 2005; Barnes & Scornavacca, 2004; Leppäniemi et al., 2005; Karjaluoto et al., 2008), with a growing interest in responsiveness, effectiveness, and branding effects (Leppäniemi & Karjaluoto, 2006). In addition, many new research areas are evolving. For instance, it can be expected that as GPS enabled mobile phones penetrate, location-based mobile marketing will become the next important research area for marketing scholars.

In this chapter our aim is to build on existing conceptualizations of mobile marketing acceptance (Karjaluoto et al., 2008) by looking at how two demographics, namely gender and age, explain the variation in the factors relating to the acceptance of mobile marketing. In other words, our objective is to throw more light on whether males and females differ in their evaluation of the importance of the constructs related to acceptance as well as whether we can find differences between the age groups.

We will build our theoretical background on the discussion of demographic differences in the use of mobile services and mobile marketing (Carlsson et al., 2005; Haghirian, Madlberger & Tanuskova, 2005; Hyvönen & Repo, 2005; Karjaluoto et al., 2006); Nysveen, Pedersen & Thorbjornsen, 2005; Okazaki, 2004). Literature indicates that there are certain differences between males and females in the use of mobile services, but relatively little empirical research has been conducted to date to examine differences in permission-based mobile marketing communications (Karjaluoto et al., 2006).