Predicting Consumer Intention To Use Mobile Advertising In China: An Empirical Study

Mobile advertising is considered one of the killer applications of mobile commerce. It defined as the business of encouraging people to buy products and services using the mobile channel as medium to deliver the advertisement message. China has the largest mobile users group of the world, allied with the popularization of mobile services like SMS (short messaging service) have created a great opportunity for marketers to explore this new channel of promotional direct marketing. With the rapid development of mobile advertising business, some problems such as the proliferation of spam short messages have also happened at the same time. The empirical study toward understanding the acceptance of mobile advertising from Chinese consumers' perspectives has great academic and practical value.Firstly, based on the model of attitude toward Web advertising and theory of reasoned action, the paper builds a research model to understand the consumer attitude toward mobile advertising. A survey is developed and the structural equitation modeling technique is used to examine the model. The result shows that Entertainment, Informativeness, Credibility and irritation of the mobile advertising information have significantly effects on consumer attitude toward mobile advertising. And consumer attitude toward mobile advertising strongly determines the consumer behavioral intention.Secondly, the paper exploring the moderating effects of consumer permission to help further understanding consumer attitude toward mobile advertising. The result shows that consumers have refused attitude toward mobile advertising message sending without permission. This shows sending mobile to consumer ads without permission is very unwise. Consumer tends to ignore these messages.This result has significant theoretical and practical value to solve the problem of the proliferation of spam short messages. Spam short messages simply will not achieve any advertising effectiveness and have negative effect to consumer attitude toward mobile advertising. It is necessary to formulate relevant laws and mandatory industry standards to prescribe mobile marketing must base on obtaining permission from consumer.Finally, the paper builds an integrated research model to explore the factors that influencing consumer intention of using mobile advertising based on the theory of planned behavior and technology acceptance model. Results show that consumer advertising has the highest influencing coefficient. This shows that consumer decision of whether or not using mobile advertising depends largely on the consumer's personal factors. Subjective norms are found not only has a direct effect on consumer behavioral intention, but also have an indirect effect through consumer attitudes. In addition, the perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, perceived risk and consumer's existing knowledge also have significant effect on consumer behavioral intention.