How Customers Trust Mobile Marketing Applications

Smartphone applications for marketing purposes like free advertising games or mobile loyalty programs are becoming increasingly prevalent. Unfortunately, due to recurring news about the excessive use of personal data, many customers consider such applications as suspicious. As a key driver for adoption, organizations try to facilitate customers’ perceived trust in the applications. In this paper, we propose a third-order trust model to evaluate the influence of technology-related trust dimensions and determinants. To evaluate their impact, we conducted a free online experiment. Surprisingly, the results of our study show that the process dimension has no significant impact on trust, indicating that users are not concerned with the underlying mechanisms of the IT artifact. Nevertheless, performance and purpose with their corresponding determinants have a significant impact on trust. Thus, by examining technology-related trust determinants for mobile marketing applications, we offer design implications to address users trust in the application development.