Consumer behavior

Consumer behavior

Introduction

Consumer behavior and mobile

Location-aware advertising is widely touted as the "killer-app" for mobile commerce to flourish. With the imminent rollout of third-generation mobile networks, advances in multimedia-enabled mobile devices and positioning technologies, its commercial viability is enormous. Location-aware advertising is primarily textbased at the present, but it is envisioned to allow the delivery of multimedia advertisements to geographically targeted consumers. This exploratory study empirically examines the effects of multimedia on consumer behavior in a simulated mobile commerce environment. A structural model was formulated to test the effects of multimedia on entertainment, informativeness, and irritation in the context of location-aware advertising. The results show that multimedia location-aware advertising messages lead to more favorable attitudes and increase the intention to reuse the mobile advertising service. Evidence also suggests that multimedia has a significant impact on purchase behavior. (Carlyn, Marcia, 2000)

Advertising plays a pivotal role in commercial activities and has undergone tremendous evolution from printed media and telephone to broadcasting media such as radio and television. With the widespread diffusion of personal computers and the ubiquity of the Internet, advertisers are further endowed with unprecedented opportunities to leverage on the reach and multiple addressing capabilities of these technologies. Traditional advertisers and early Internet advertisers have largely used the media as a channel for mass communication. However, in recent years, marketers have begun to regard direct marketing as being a more profitable approach. Consequently, there is a trend toward using more personalized one-to-one relationship marketing with the aid of database technologies and Web-based "cookies" to gather more information about the consumers in order to deliver more relevant and higher impact advertising messages (Carlyn, Marcia, 2000)

Explanation

Over the past few years, the development of mobile communication and positioning technologies has presented advertisers with a radically new form of advertising channel: location-aware advertising (LAA). Location-aware advertising involves the provision of advertising messages to cellular subscribers based on their location. Wireless as a channel for advertising possesses unique characteristics unavailable in traditional and electronic media. It opens up an innovative conduit to deliver advertisements, promotions, coupons, and other offers that are uniquely customized to an individual's tastes, geographical location, and time of day (Xu et al. 2003). With LAA, advertisers could reach consumers when they are most likely to make a purchase and deliver advertising messages contextually through the media on a geographically targeted basis. Analysts predict that location-aware advertising messages are expected to create 5 to 10 times higher click-through rates compared to Internet advertising messages(Carlyn, Marcia, 2000) Despite the vast opportunities offered by location-aware advertising, many merchants and consumers are still skeptical about the idea. Besides the overarching concerns of location information privacy, another important impeding factor is the effectiveness of the mobile media.

Compared to TV and Internet media, mobile devices lack ability to transmit or receive rich multimedia content because they are constrained by the bandwidth of communication networks. In addition, the limited "screen-estate" and the fact that the current generation of mobile devices are mostly monochrome have inhibited ...