Türkiye'de SMS Reklamlari: Tüketici Tutumlarini Etkileyen Faktörler SMS Advertising In Turkey: Factors Affecting Consumer Attitudes

The rapid increase of the use of mobile phones has created new delivery platforms to both marketers and advertisers. As the popularity of mobile devices increases, Short Messaging Service (SMS) has become more important to access potential customers. Recently, Internet and mobile telephony technologies have become more integrated. The marriage of the Internet and wireless telephony that use such platforms as Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) Short Message Services (SMS), and variants of Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) can make serious financial contributions to global wireless advertising revenue as a new advertising arena. This new advertising platform, which is wireless advertising or mobile advertising, refers to any communication about products, services, and ideas uses mobile devices for promotional purposes. There are two forms of mobile advertising. The early and the first form is the SMS ads and the second mobile advertising form is Multimedia Message Service (MMS). MMS ads are more creative and effective than was the early mobile advertising form. SMS advertising offers important advantages to the advertiser who seeks to have effective two- way communication with consumers. The research on attitudes toward advertising has two important branches. One is the attitude toward the ad (A ad), and the other is the attitude toward advertising in general. A ad concept is related to a specific advertisement, especially exposure to the advertising in specific mediums. In contrast to Aad, the attitude toward advertising in general is related to the consumers’ general idea of the advertising system and is a more comprehensive concept. Early studies on A ad focus on the consumers’ cognitive information process in terms of recall of ad content, unaided recall, and recognition. Then, studies started to investigate the nature and effects of consumers’ affective reaction to actual advertising stimuli. Consumer attitudes toward advertising in general are widely researched. Most of these studies focus on the structure of advertising attitudes rather than the generalizability of overall attitudes. In other words, respondents typically are asked not only about their overall attitudes toward advertisement, but also their perception of advertising in terms of trustworthiness, offensiveness, informativeness, entertainment value, the effects on product prices and value as well as the attitudes toward regulatory issues. In recent years, consumers’ attitudes towards new medium advertisement, such as the Internet, are being investigated. Most studies attempting to measure attitudes toward online advertising derive their theoretical frameworks from previous studies of attitude toward advertising in general. The starting point of consumer attitudes toward SMS advertising studies is based on the models of consumer attitudes toward online advertising studies and the constructs of those models. Additionally, the Diffusion of Innovation Theory, Technology Acceptance Theory, and the Theory of Reasoned Action have been used to explain consumer attitudes towards SMS advertising. These theories can explain and develop models for both intention and behavior toward acceptance of SMS advertising. According to other studies on consumer attitudes toward SMS advertising, permission, wireless service provider control, mobile advertising trust, perceived irritation, information, entertainment, credibility, and delivery of message are the mentioned factors that explain consumer attitudes toward SMS advertising. However, irritation, information, entertainment, credibility, and permission are the highlighted factors in these studies. This study examines the factors that affect consumer attitudes towards SMS advertising and the relationship between these factors and attitude. Face-to-face survey was the method chosen to collect the data. The questionnaire has two parts. The first part contains 30 items that measures attitudes toward SMS advertising. In the second part of the questionnaire, age, sex and mobile phone ownership of respondents were determined. Respondents were chosen by using the Convenience Sampling method. The 30 items on the attitude measurement scale were subjected to principal component analysis (PCA) with varimax rotation. 13 items was excluded analysis and 17 items produced four components with eigenvalues that exceeded 1. These components were named as Infotainment, Life Partner, Privacy, and Irritation. The results show parallel findings to the literature, namely, that Irritation is