Integrating Mobile Marketing into the Marketing Communication: Exemplification of Mobile Marketing Campaigns

Introduction

Penetration of Internet all over the world, closely followed by mobile technology creates opportunities for companies to reach their potential and current customers. Developments in information and communication technology give rise to new marketing communication channels and companies integrate all these channels to communicate the value propositions to their customers. Mobile communication is a fast-growing medium in terms of penetration and usage. The worldwide mobile subscriber base is still growing, there are more than 3 billion mobile subscribers worldwide (Wireless Intelligence, 2007). Mobile networks and infrastructure make connections better than ever and mobile handsets become better and easier to use. Therefore, mobile communication is becoming a primary means of communication channel. The emergence of high speed wireless network technologies and the increasing market penetration of mobile phones and other mobile devices highlight the potential and significance of the mobile channel for marketing.

Marketers have shown a great interest in reaching to and communicating with their customers and prospects through the mobile channel. Mobile communication enables highly targeted and timely marketing communications and it is becoming increasingly popular in the promotion of goods and services. Mobile marketing (m-marketing) campaign provides a company the ability to segment its target group based on specific criteria, to directly and efficiently reach these selected segments at anywhere and anytime (Balasubramanian, Peterson, and Järvenpää 2002; Barwise and Strong, 2002; Barnes and Scornavacca, 2004; Karjaluoto et al., 2007). Since m-marketing campaigns allow directly and efficiently targeting selected segments, it also helps to measure the effectiveness of the campaign at the individual level (Gopal and Tripathi, 2006). M-marketing creates new opportunities for the companies. Marketing has been gradually developing hand in hand with technological changes and the assortment of m-marketing campaign is also constantly changing, developing and transforming; so it is worthwhile to investigate the nature of m-marketing campaigns in a detailed way.

The main objective of this chapter is to provide an insight into the nature of m-marketing campaigns and get a comprehensive understanding about the fundamental concepts of m-marketing campaigns. Towards this end, the main concepts, strategies, objectives and tactics of m-marketing campaigns were reviewed on the basis of the relevant literature and exemplified with the real-life m-marketing campaign cases. Case study is particularly welcome in new situations where only a little is known about the phenomenon and in situations where current theories seem inadequate (Eisenhardt, 1989). The aim of the case study is to attain a comprehensive and detailed a description of the phenomena (Eisenhardt and Graebner, 2007). In this exploratory study, certain cases were chosen from the case database of Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) in order to exemplify m-marketing campaigns. The purpose of exemplifying the m-marketing campaigns with cases is not to make a generalization and attain a generalizable result; but to have a better understanding of the nature of the m-marketing campaigns. Objectives, implementation (specific tactics that are used to reach objective of the campaign), and the results of the campaign were indicated for the cases that were used to exemplification of m-marketing campaigns.