Carefulness Matters: Consumer Responses to Short Message Service Advertising

ABSTRACT

Short message service (SMS) has been widely used by consumers, and SMS advertising has emerged as a popular topic in advertising and mobile commerce areas. However, the literature has not sufficiently clarified the impact of consumers’ carefulness in reading SMS ad messages (the extent to which a consumer reads an ad thoroughly and thoughtfully) on their responses. Using the SMS reading behavior and the SMS advertising effectiveness models as overarching frameworks, this study developed a research model explaining the effect of consumers’ carefulness in reading SMS ad messages on their responses. The findings of this study indicate that if consumers give their explicit permission to receive SMS ad messages from a company, they are more likely to read such messages carefully, which further strengthens the effects of the messages’ content relevance, informativeness, entertainment, and interactivity on their attitudes toward the received messages. This study is new in introducing reading carefulness to explain consumers’ responses to SMS advertising. Moreover, it initiated the inclusion of two novel responses, that is, intention to forward SMS ad messages and intention to contact marketers for more information. The findings provide useful and practicable insights to marketers for effectively communicating with consumers via SMS.

KEY WORDS AND PHRASES:

• Ad reading carefulness
• mobile advertising
• online advertising
• permission marketing
• short message service (SMS)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fan-Chen Tseng

FAN-CHEN TSENG ([email protected]) is an associate professor in the Department of Multimedia and M-Commerce at Kainan University, Taiwan. He holds a Ph.D. from National Taiwan University. His research focuses on e-/m-commerce and Internet marketing. He “has published” in International Journal of Mobile Communications, Technovation, Internet Research, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communications, and Expert Systems with Applications.

Ching-I Teng

CHING-I TENG ([email protected]; corresponding author) is a professor at Chang Gung University, Taiwan and a research fellow in the Department of Rehabilitation, Chang Gung Memorial Hospital. He holds a Ph.D. in management from National Taiwan University. His research focuses on electronic commerce and service management. He has been awarded the title of Distinguished Researcher by Chang Gung University. He has published in Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communications, and a number of other journals.