Adopter segments, adoption determinants and mobile marketing

Abstract

Today's mobile ICT environment is an environment in which technology is evolving at a dazzling speed, in which consumers are overwhelmed with an ever-increasing amount of innovations at the device as well as the service level, and in which the supply-side's development and marketing departments are confronted with new challenges. In this environment, the success of innovations has become highly unpredictable and increasingly dependent on at least equally unpredictable attitudes towards the technology. One of the major challenges in today's highly competitive mobile ICT environment, coping with shortening product lifecycles and an increasing number of failing innovations, is the quest for more efficient introduction strategies in terms of more accurate segment targeting. In order to achieve this, the acquisition of a more accurate insight into adoption determinants has become an absolute prerequisite. To date, however, the literature and research on those determinants remain too fragmented to be a solid foundation for such research. Starting from a new comprehensive determinant model, we developed an item battery to measure the totality of possible determinants, and illustrate its application in two case studies on mobile innovations about to be introduced in Flanders: mobile news (n: 269) and mobile television (n: 405). Crossing such accurate attitudinal determinant insights with intention-based segmentation forecasts might provide mobile marketers with valuable input to set up more efficient mobile marketing and targeting campaigns in today's mobile ICT environment.