SMS advertising the Hallyu way: drivers, acceptance and intention to receive Steve Dix, Kyle Jamieson and Anwar Sadat Shimul School of Marketing, Curtin University, Perth, Australia Abstract Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the drivers of the acceptance of short message services (SMS) advertising and how it is still relevant and active in South Korea. Design/methodology/approach – An exploratory approach was applied with convenience sample of 206 valid responses. Existing scales were used to measure consumer’s acceptance of SMS advertising, intention to receive SMS advertising and responses to SMS advertising. Findings – The findings of this study show that the utility and context of the SMS advertising as well as consumers’ trust and attitude towards the advertising are the key drivers of consumers’ acceptance of SMS advertising in South Korea. Moreover, acceptance of SMS advertising is positively associated with intention to receive the message and further behavioural responses. Research limitations/implications – The outcomes of this study would be critical for practitioners to build strategies and conduct effective and creative SMS advertising campaigns in future. Mobile marketers should emphasize on the utility and context of the message that match with the consumers’ taste and preferences. Furthermore, consumers’ personal information needs to keep private and confidential which will create trust towards the SMS advertiser and in turn generate acceptance of SMS advertising. Originality/value – This study focuses on the consumer’s willingness to receive SMS advertising and behavioural responses to SMS advertising in South Korea which has not been explored by earlier studies. Keywords South Korea, Mobile marketing, Consumer acceptance, SMS advertising Paper type Case study Introduction The rapid development in the mobile phone technology and the affordability of mobile phone handsets have contributed to the widespread adoption of mobile phone services (e.g. Wong et al., 2015; Linhart and Linhartova, 2012). There are about 6.9 billion mobile phone subscribers worldwide (Mobithinking.com, 2014) which is estimated to reach 8.5 billion by the end of 2016 (Portio Research, 2013). The global acceptance of mobile phone technology has empowered consumers to communicate not only through voice call services but also by multimedia messaging options whereby short message services (SMS) stands out as a primary communication tool (Radder et al., 2010). Marketers around the world use mobile SMS as an advertising tool to reach specific market segment with highly customized, addressable and timely promotional messages (Chen and Hsieh, 2012). SMS advertising also gets higher consumer engagement than other traditional media (Bauer et al., 2005). Moreover, SMS advertising is considered one of the most effective ways of reaching consumers as about 90 per cent of the SMS are read within the first three minutes of the delivery (Tolentino, 2015). It has also been estimated that marketers will spend more than $101.37 billion on mobile advertising in 2016, which will reach $195.55 billion by the year 2019 (Takahashi, 2015). Asia Pacific Journal of Marketing and Logistics Vol. 28 No. 2, 2016 pp. 366-380 © Emerald Group Publishing Limited 1355-5855 DOI 10.1108/APJML-09-2015-0146 Received 28 September 2015 Accepted 1 October 2015 The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at: www.emeraldinsight.com/1355-5855.htm 366 APJML 28,2