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TopBackground On Mobile Marketing
The rapid penetration rate of mobile devices, the huge amounts of investment from industries, and the advancement of mobile technologies, all make it feasible to do marketing via mobile devices. Mobile commerce (mCommerce) refers to a category of business applications that derive their profit from business opportunities created by mobile technologies (Bose, 2007).
Mobile marketing, as a branch of m-commerce (Varshney & Vetter, 2002), refers to any marketing activities conducted via mobile technologies. Usually mcommerce is regarded as a subset of e-commerce (Coursaris & Hassanein, 2002). That is true, but due to the characteristics of mobile technologies, mobile marketing is different from other e-commerce activities. The first difference is caused by mobile technologies’ ability to reach people anywhere and anytime; therefore mobile marketing can take the advantage of contextual information. Dey and Abowd (2001) defined context as “any information that characterizes a situation related to the interaction between users, applications, and the surrounding environment.” Time, location, and network conditions are three of the key elements of context. The second difference is caused by the characteristics of mobile devices. Mobile devices have limited display abilities. The screens are usually small, and some of the devices cannot display color pictures or animations. On the other hand, mobile devices have various kinds of screen shapes, sizes, and resolutions. Thus, delivering appropriate content to specific devices is very important. Mobile devices also have limited input abilities, and this makes it difficult for customers to respond.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Mobile Commerce (m-commerce): Is a subset of e-commerce and involves use of wireless handheld devices such as cellular phones and tablets/laptops to conduct ecommerce transactions online.
Mobile Marketing Ethics: Is set of rules or obligations following the area of applied ethics which deals with the moral principles behind the operation and regulation of marketing activities in specific context of m-commerce
Short Message Service (SMS)/Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS): Is a text/audio/video messaging service component of phone, web, or mobile communication systems, using standardized communications protocols that allow the exchange of text/audio/video messages between fixed line or mobile devices.
Electronic Commerce (E-Commerce): Is defined as the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. Electronic commerce leverages various technologies as electronic money transfer, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange/exchange (EDI), inventory management systems, web supply chain management, and automated data collection systems.
Location Based Services (LBS): Is a software application for a IP-capable mobile device for offering information, entertainment, social media service, or any value-added services after employing geographical position of the user. Examples include turn-by-turn directions, gas prices near the user's location, services listing and rating nearby restaurants, and social media applications identifying friends' locations.
Mobile Marketing: According to Mobile Marketing Association, Mobile Marketing is defined as “a set of practices that enables organizations to communicate and engage with their audience in an interactive and relevant manner through any mobile device or network.”