Abstract

Paralleling the growing space mobile phones take in today’s consumers’ daily routines, academic mobile marketing research has been growing at an increasing pace recently. The presence of multiple players in the mobile eco-system and the wide range of topics under investigation, coupled with the fragmented nature of the mobile marketing domain, call for an updated unifying framework. Accordingly, this review looks at the last decade of mobile marketing research and provides an overview by offering an integrated framework and an extensive review of the research in this domain. Based on a database of 178 articles published in top marketing journals over the last decade, we formulate a framework that is based on (1) the transformation of consumer behavior considering the shifts in users’ lifestyles, (2) the effects of mobile on the transformation of existing and the emergence of new businesses, and (3) the integration of mobile within the existing channel mix and its interaction with other channels. In this framework, we first classify each article under various research themes, type of data collection, and their dependent and independent variables. We then synthesize the extant literature in each of the sub-research topics under our framework: the mobile transformations of consumers and businesses, mobile applications, mobile channel deployment and integration, mobile advertising and promotions, promotions, how mobile facilitates consumer-to-business connections, and mobile data. This review provides insights on the recent evolution of the mobile marketing field as well as presenting avenues for future research.

The Rise of Mobile Marketing: A Decade of Research in Review

The Rise of Mobile Marketing: A Decade of Research in Review is structured around the pillars and the interactions identified within computer-mediated environments: consumer-to-firm, firm-to-consumer, consumer-to-consumer, and firm-to-firm. Mobile marketing papers are broadly classified under three main themes: (1) the transformation of consumer behavior enabled by the mobile shift in consumers’ daily routines; (2) the mobile transformation of existing, and the emergence of new, businesses enabled by mobile platforms; and (3) the interaction and integration of the mobile channel with other channels.

Section 2 outlines the approach in identifying the research papers that form the basis of this review and provides an overview of the evolution of mobile marketing research over the decade. Section 3 focuses on how mobile technology transforms consumers and their behavior, along with their interactions with other consumers. Section 4 outlines the transformation of traditional businesses and the emergence of new ones. Section 5 delves into how businesses interact with consumers, including the interaction of the mobile channel with traditional channel. Section 6 shows how consumers interact with businesses on the reverse side. The ‘business-to-consumer interaction’ in this monograph is structured around the 4P’s of marketing within the mobile marketing mix. Specifically, mobile apps as stand-alone products and their pricing strategies are discussed in a separate Mobile Apps section. Attention turns to the mobile channel, reviewing the literature on a firm’s decision to add the mobile channel to its mix of distribution channels, its integration with existing channels, and its impact on business outcomes. The authors conclude our review of how mobile reshapes business-to-consumer interactions with a discussion on the attitudes towards and the effect of mobile advertising, and the effectiveness of mobile promotions, placing special emphasis on location-based targeting. Last, we discuss the novel uses of mobile data (Section 7) and present avenues for future research (Section 8).