Consumer responsiveness to mobile marketing

From a marketing communication point of view, new digital marketing channels, such as Internet and mobile phones, are considered to be powerful opportunities to reach consumers by allowing interactivity and personalisation of the content and context of the message. The increased number of media has, however, led to a harder competition for consumers’ attention. Given the potential of digital media it is interesting to understand how consumers are going to relate to mobile marketing efforts. The purpose of the paper was to explore consumers’ responsiveness to mobile marketing communication. With mobile marketing we refer to the use of SMS and MMS as marketing media in push campaigns. It is argued in the paper that consumer responsiveness is a function of personally perceived relevance of the marketing message as well as on the disturbance/acceptance of the context of receiving the message. A relevance/disturbance framework can thus measure the effectiveness of mobile marketing communication. An empirical study was conducted in Finland, where responsiveness to mobile marketing was benchmarked against e-mail communication. Findings from this study indicated that responsiveness to mobile marketing communication varies among consumers. Compared to traditional direct mail and commercial email communication, the responsiveness to mobile marketing was considerably lower. However, even if the majority of consumers showed low responsiveness to mobile marketing there were also consumers who welcome such messages.