Effectiveness of Mobile Advertising: The Indian Scenario
Authors: Tripathi Shalini N , Siddiqui Masood H 
Published: January 2017

In the current scenario, mobile internet applications enable consumers to access a variety of services: Web information search, SMS (short message service), MMS (multimedia message service), banking, payment, gaming, e-mailing, chat, weather forecast, GPS (global positioning service), and so forth. Collectively, we denominate this wide array of services as “mcommerce.” These digital media are considered to potentially improve the possibilities to reach consumers by allowing personalization of the content and context of the message. Combining customer's user profile and the context situation, advertising companies can provide the target customers exactly the advertisement information they desire, not just “spam” them with irrelevant advertisements. Drawing from Nysveen, Pedersen, and Thorbjornsen's (2005) grid of mobile internet services classification, this study attempts to critically analyse “person interactive” (goal-oriented) information and “person interactive” (experiential) messaging, targeting both utilitarian and hedonic benefits from the consumers' perspective. It analyses the effectiveness of mobile advertising in its current format (as prevalent in India). ‘Effectiveness’ for the purpose of this study has been concretized in terms of impact of mobile advertising on the purchase decision of the consumer. However, results of binary logistic regression indicate that mobile advertising in its current format does not have a significant impact on the purchase decision of a consumer, and that there might be other significant factors like a firm's marketing efforts (marketing mix), a consumers' socio-cultural environment (family, informal sources, non-commercial sources, social class, culture and sub-culture), and an individual's psychological field (motivation, perception, learning, personality, and attitudes) that affect his purchase decision. Mobile advertising in its current format is very generic in its approach, as substantiated by factor analysis performed on the data — marketing communication through mobiles primarily lacked in contextualization and perceived usefulness (for the target customers), and were disruptive in nature. Although mobiles are a powerful mode of marketing communication, the important issues at stake here are— what to say, how to say it, to whom, and how often. Communications get more and more difficult, as a large number of companies clamour for getting the consumers' increasingly divided attention through various means. Hence the challenge lies in customizing the marketing communication to suit individual needs (Customerization), i.e., reaching the right target market with the right message at the right time. Also, variations in consumer responsiveness towards mobile advertising have been examined using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Finally, some features enhancing the utilitarian and hedonic benefits drawn (or expected) from mobile advertising are prioritized. This enhancement of benefits can be implemented by incorporating Intelligent Software Agents, which make customerization of marketing messages a reality—delivering all the desired benefits (utilitarian⁄hedonic) to the consumers. Software Agents are programmes which fulfill a task independently on behalf of the user and can be adapted to the individual preferences and parameters of its instructor; software agents operate without intervention of the user at a specific problem definition.