An Investigation and Conceptual Model of SMS Marketing Astrid Dickinger, Parissa Haghirian Vienna University of Economics & Business Administration, International Marketing and Management Department; {astrid.dickinger, parissa.haghirian}@wu-wien.ac.at Jamie Murphy, Arno Scharl University of Western Australia, Business School {jmurphy, ascharl}@ecel.uwa.edu.au Abstract Mobile marketing, also known as wireless marketing, promises vast opportunities. Still in an experimental phase, businesses have little experience using this new marketing tool. Mobile services offer companies pow- erful marketing potential via direct commu- nication with consumers, anytime and any- where, but little research on this subject ex- ists. This paper discusses Short Message Services (SMS), which belong to the first and most successful forms of mobile data transmission. Based on a literature review and exploratory qualitative research, this paper defines mobile marketing, describes its most popular application, text messaging, introduces a conceptual model of success factors for implementing mobile marketing, and proposes future research avenues. 1. Introduction They live in the same house but their lives contrast. Like many of her 16-year old friends doted on by parents and grandpar- ents, Ingrid Johnson has time to kill, money to burn, follows trends and loves to shop. Her dad, Bill Johnson, would kill for free time, pinches pennies, ignores trends and hates to shop. Yet they passionately agree on one thing; they could not survive without their cell phone. The quest for companies is leveraging cell phone technology in order to effectively market to both Ingrid and Bill. Mobile devices increase consumer commu- nication and challenge companies as to ap- propriate marketing. As with most new technologies, mobile usage differs geographically. Unlike the Internet, where the US led the adoption, Ja- pan leads in mobile Internet technology, with a penetration of Internet enabled phones of 72% as of June 2002. Europe and North America lag at 45% and 25% respec- tively, according to an A. T. Kearney and University of Cambridge survey of 15 indus- trialized countries [2]. These differences in mobile technology adoption relate to differ- ences in the global development and pricing of cell phones. Japan introduced cell phones with constant Internet access in 1999. These devices let customers receive and display messages, figures and photographs. About 60 million Japanese, or 47%, actually use Internet en- abled mobile services [38]. The Japanese market, which Europe and America may follow, leads the world in the development of mobile marketing, illustrated by the Japa- nese cell phone display in Figure 1. Figure 1. Japanese cell phone display (www.j-phone.com/japanese/products/display.html) Development aside, an important question for companies in all countries is how to use this personalized marketing tool effectively. Proceedings of the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2004 0-7695-2056-1/04 $17.00 (C) 2004 IEEE 1