Understanding and predicting consumers' participation in mobile sales promotions : an extended reasoned action approach

• Main Author: Gogus, Cigdem
• Published: University of Reading 2009
• Subjects: 658.8
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.528834

The advent of the mobile technologies is transforming the relationships between the firm and its customers. The mobile phone, which has become indispensable to many people, is increasingly being used as a unique and innovative marketing channel that enables personal, interactive, anytime, anywhere communication. Although there have been some studies in mobile marketing, most of them concentrate on consumers‟ perceptions of and attitudes towards mobile marketing. There is a scarcity of research that examines consumers behaviour in relation to mobile marketing communications. This thesis develops and tests a model, based on an extended version of Fishbein and Ajzen's (1975) theory of reasoned action, to understand and predict consumers participation in mobile sales promotions. Drawing from literature in the fields of sales promotion, mobile marketing and prediction of behaviour, the model proposes four main influences on consumers participation behaviour: attitude, subjective norm, behavioural intention, and past behaviour. The results of the empirical study, a two-stage large-scale survey conducted with the participants of major mobile sales promotion campaign, show support for the effects of attitude, behavioural intention and past behaviour on consumers‟ participation in mobile sales promotions. The study reported in this thesis makes a number of contributions to marketing research; specifically to the understanding of consumer response to mobile sales promotions. From a theoretical perspective, the extensions made to the theory of reasoned action (a multidimensional attitudinal structure instead of a uni-dimensional one; a positive influence from attitudes to subjective norms instead of independency between these constructs; and the inclusion of the past behaviour construct) support earlier empirical findings that the structure underlying Fishbein and Ajzen‟s theory is richer in content and more complex than it is originally stated. From a managerial perspective the findings show that attitude, behavioural intention, and past behaviour are the three most important factors in determining consumers‟ participation in mobile sales promotions. From a methodological perspective, the use of Partial Least Squares (PLS), a robust structural equation modelling technique mainly concerned with “prediction”, is found to be useful in understanding the antecedents of behaviour under inquiry as well as predicting it; a finding that contributes to a greater understanding of the relevance of PLS in marketing based business studies.