Barriers for mobile marketing and how to overcome them

In most countries, consumer adoption of digital mobile telecommunications has been faster than that of the Internet. It has been estimated that during 2005 nearly 50 % of European adults will be using mobile terminals that are multimedia enabled. This allows the transmission of pictures, applications, music and video over to mobile phones. The rise of the new technology gives marketers new possibilities to create richer mobile content and leverage interactivity for their promotions. Recent studies have focused primarily on consumer acceptance of mobile marketing, such as text messaging, i.e. SMS, based advertising. The emerging mobile marketing value system has received less attention in the current literature. Research is needed to investigate the role and aspirations of the key marketing deciders and the decision influencers. Our study describes an action research endeavour employing the principles of collaboration engineering to address above mentioned research problem. We designed a repeatable collaboration process for finding out the major barriers for mobile marketing and the actions needed to overcome those. As for the technology we employed computer-aided Group Support Systems in a face-to-face setting. As a result, we were able to define both the perceived barriers for growth of mobile marketing, as well as to identify the ways to overcome the barriers. In conclusion, we state that by using carefully designed, repeatable collaboration processes we can enable the key players in the emerging mobile marketing value system outline together the action proposals needed for stimulating the growth of mobile marketing. This action research provides insights also to the strategic network discourse related to mobile business. Moreover, the results raise import topics for practitioners to consider in their mobile marketing endeavours.