Content design of advertisement for consumer exposure: Mobile marketing through short messaging service

The success of mobile phone-based short messaging service (SMS) commercials as a tool of promotional marketing depends upon the wording, statement, language, presentation − in other words, the overall content of the message. If consumers are not exposed to the mobile phone SMS containing promotional offers, marketers would less likely to achieve any benefits by sending SMS to prospective consumers. This study is aimed to identify and empirically examine the critical variables that can attract consumers to open and read the advertisement on the SMS. To address consumer exposure, the study was designed on the conceptual paradigms of the UTAUT2 with the inclusion of three external constructs: personalization, self-concept, and trust. Through a consumer survey, this study found significant variations from the UTAUT2 to provide new constructs to capture consumer intentions for exposure to the product. By doing so, this study has developed and tested an extended version of UTAUT2, which is named as UTAUT-CEMM (Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology of Consumer Exposure for Mobile Message). It revealed that consumer segmentation and target marketing is the most effective way to communicate with consumers through promotional marketing conducted by the mobile phone SMS. It also suggested that this promotional marketing is valuable only for highly reputable vendors/retailers.