Consumer Attitudes toward SMS Advertising among Jordanian Users

Abstract

There has been a tremendous growth in the mobile telecommunication industry in Jordan. Jordan has already crossed the 6 million users mark in February 2009 (Arab Advisors Group's, 2010). At the same time, there has also been a growth in the mobile advertising space in Jordan. Although several papers have been written in the recent times about consumer attitudes towards mobile advertising, a systematic study of these for Jordan context is lacking. This paper has tried to address this need. The underlying paper discusses its relevance and investigates antecedents of consumer attitudes towards SMS advertising via mo-bile devices and variables influencing it. The analysis is based on a consumer survey. For this purpose a quota sam-ple of 130 cellular phone users in Jordan has been interviewed. It was found that consumers’ perceptions of the entertainment value, Informativeness and credibility of SMS advertisements are positively correlated to consumers’ overall attitudes towards SMS advertisements. The study further found consumers’ perceptions of the irritation aspect of SMS advertisements is negatively correlated with consumers’ attitudes towards SMS advertisements. The results indicate that attitude toward advertising via mobile devices strongly depends on message Characteristics. The message characteristics need to be developed carefully. Marketers can not only rely on the fact that an advertising message sent via mobile devices will be read and remembered automatically. Also the results indicate that advertising value and advertising message content have the largest impact on attitude toward advertising via mobile devices.