Driving advertising into mobile mediums : Study of consumer attitudes towards mobile advertising and of factors affecting on them

Abstract: The high penetration rate of mobile phones along with the recent technological development has created a whole new marketing medium named mobile advertising filled with possibilities for the advertisers. Earlier studies have although indicated the success of this new advertising channel to depend on user acceptance of receiving mobile ads. Wherefore a study of consumer attitudes towards mobile advertising can be considered necessary in order to create a lucrative business. Even though this topic is relatively new several studies have already been gathered concerning user attitudes towards mobile advertising, mostly in Asian countries. Our paper aims to fill up the research gap by targeting the research to young adults in Sweden and providing thus with a study on young adult attitudes towards mobile advertising and the factors affecting them, in Sweden. To be able to see if any relation between existing literature and empirical data exists four hypotheses have been constructed. This paper has identified user acceptance of advertising, user-based characteristics, advertising characteristics, as a well as mobile service characteristic to be main consumer acceptance drivers of mobile adverting. The four hypotheses set up for the paper could be confirmed with the help of a Pearson correlation test, which showed a significant relationship between all tested variables and a weak positive correlation. The relations are though weaker than the previous literature declares. Further results of this paper indicates that users are in general negative towards mobile advertising, and that permission and incentive based services most likely are to influence consumer attitudes towards the service.