Mobile Couponing - Measuring Consumers, Acceptance and Preferences with a Limit Conjoint Approach

Coupons are an established promotional tool in marketing and sales. The increasing adoption of mobile telephony and ongoing diffusion of mobile phones have spurred first attempts in mobile couponing. Since consumer preferences and information on service choice behaviour can be of significant value in development processes of innovative products or services such as mobile couponing, we applied a limit conjoint analysis in order to gather first evidence regarding consumer preferences for mobile couponing service attributes. Of the four service attributes included in the conjoint experiment, the configuration channel was found to have the greatest relative importance, followed by the type of coupons, the possibility to personalize or filter the offered coupons, and the location-awareness of the couponing service. Limit card ranks indicated that more than 80% of the n=125 subjects would accept at least one of the described mobile couponing services. 1. Research Challenge The design of mobile services is at the center of interest of companies pushing into the wireless channel as well as of researchers trying to understand success and acceptance of emerging mobile applications. The broad adoption of wireless communication technology prepared the ground for all kinds of services delivered to a consumer’s mobile device. At the same time the medium gains in attractiveness as a marketing and advertising channel [3,2,6,8,31,32,41,43,16]. The specific promotional tool mobile couponing is the merger of classical couponing and mobile communications. It has been part of mobile and location-based service visions ever since the advent of the m-commerce discussion [32,41,7,43,53] and has already been subject to several pilot studies and niche campaigns but not reached the mass market yet. The design of a mobile couponing service remains challenging and laden with uncertainty regarding consumers’ overall acceptance and design preferences. The task of preference elicitation for entirely new services imposes a number of methodological and contextual problems. Consumers have greater uncertainty regarding Kai Wehmeyer, Claas Müller-Lankenau 2 the usefulness of the service as analogies for comparison are difficult to find and there may be changes in behavior and routines associated with the new service that are hard to predict for them. Furthermore, consumers are forced to assess purported benefits without personal experience [28]. Our research seizes the challenge of preference elicitation for innovative mobile services. This study aims at gathering first insights into consumers’ preferences for mobile couponing. Methodologically, this study is based on the conjoint measurement technique which has been primarily used in design processes of tangible and well established product categories [61,22]. However, it has also proven to be valuable for assessing and evaluating innovative services like mobile couponing [34]. In consideration of this issue, we applied a limit conjoint analysis in order to gather first evidence regarding consumer preferences for mobile couponing service attributes and their overall acceptance. Limit conjoint analysis is a modification of traditional conjoint analysis and similarly applied. Some further questions regarding design issues of a mobile couponing service also motivated this research. Especially the aspect of a service’s location-sensitiveness is of interest here. What value do consumers attribute to this feature and how does it relate to other service features? We will start out with an introduction of couponing and its mobile counterpart as promotional tools in marketing. Chapter 3 briefly explains limit conjoint analysis as a variety of the classical conjoint analysis before elaborating on the research design and data collection procedure. In chapter 4 the results are presented. Subsequently, the results will be discussed in chapter 5, followed by directions for further research, limitations of our study, and some concluding remarks.