Investigating the Impact of Mobile Marketing in the Current Indian Scenario and Proposing CUSTOMERIZATION as a Solution

Key Words: consumer responsiveness, mobile marketing/advertising, purchase decision, customization, Customerization Innovation creates marketing opportunities and challenges. Mobile advertising, an area of mobile commerce, is a form of advertising that targets users of handheld wireless devices such as mobile phones and PDAs. It can reach the target customers anywhere anytime. In order to promote the selling of products or services, all the activities required to communicate with the customers are transferred through mobile devices. Combining with the customer's user profile and context situation, advertising companies can provide the target customers exactly the advertisement information they desire, not just " spam " them with irrelevant advertisements. Previous studies have investigated dimensions of consumer acceptance of mobile marketing/ advertising. In contrast the current study attempts to study consumer responsiveness to mobile marketing, in terms of its impact on purchase decision making. The primary objective being to gain an insight into the perception of mobile users, towards mobile marketing/advertising and their utility value in terms of impact on the purchase decision. Hence we are attempting to explore consumers' responsiveness to mobile marketing, taking into cognizance the impact of demographic factors. The study also aims to concretize some features enhancing the acceptability/ utility of mobile marketing/advertising and suggests an appropriate strategic initiative for the same. The major findings reveal that the perception of consumers towards mobile marketing can be broadly categorized into three factors: 1) Lack of contextualization and personalization of mobile ads 2) Disruptive nature of mobile ads 3) Perceived usefulness of mobile ads. Further results indicate that mobile marketing/ advertising (in its current format) does not have a significant impact on the purchase/brand decision of consumers. Mobile marketing is relatively at a nascent stage in India. Distinct preferences were expressed by customers regarding the desirable content of such messages. Customers are looking for customization of mobile marketing messages as per their individual requirements, tastes and preferences. Hence the need of the hour appears to be Customerization. Customerization combines operationally driven mass customization with customized marketing in a way that the company is able to respond to individual customers by customizing its products, services, and messages on a one-to-one basis. Marketers could harness the complete potential of mobile advertising by deploying Intelligent Mobile Software Agents, which enable firms to completely customize mobile marketing messages to individual customer preferences. Artificial intelligence is harnessed, which enables software agents to learn, optimize, and individualize information dissemination to …