Linking Business Owner’s Market Capability and Mobile Marketing Adoption: Experience from Tanzania

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to analyze the influence of business owner’s market capabilities on adoption of mobile marketing among tourist enterprises in Tanzania. It is well evidenced that market capability has been cited as a tool to enable tourist enterprises to adopt new innovation. Owners of family tourist enterprises in Tanzania are subjected to the good exposure to mobile technology which increases their market capabilities. However, majority of family tourist enterprise in Tanzania are considered to be slow in adopting a full package of mobile marketing technology for their business. This chapter of the book is intended to analyze the linkage between owner’s market capabilities on adoption of mobile marketing. This study used positivism paradigm to test the influence of owner’s market capability on tourism enterprises adoption of mobile marketing. Questionnaire was used to collect data for statistical analysis. Owners of tourist enterprise are the targeted population of this study. The owners were considered to be suitable as they are decision-makers of their enterprises in any adoption of innovation. Simple random sampling was used to draw a sample from 392 respondents in tourism sector. Data were collected in Arusha and Dar es Salaam region in Tanzania. These areas were selected because of high involvement of tourism activities which are demanding the use of mobile marketing. Validity was ensured using exploratory factor analysis and reliability was tested using Cronbach’s alpha. Using structural equation modeling, the finding indicated that owner’s market capability has significance influence on firm adoption of mobile marketing. Additionally, market skills and experience tend to account for explanatory power for market capability to account for mobile marketing adoption. This is empirical evidence in the context of Tanzania, linking owners of family business market capability and mobile marketing adoption in tourism. Additionally, market capability is evidenced to account vague operational variables. This chapter came up with operational indicators of market capability and mobile marketing adoption which account the context of Tanzania tourism sector.