Weather and Mobile Purchases: 10-Million-User Field Study

Abstract

Although weather may profoundly affect people’s daily life, marketers rarely commit resources for launching weather-related business strategies due to the fleeting nature of weather. However, mobile technology is now changing the speed of business and the business of weather. Facebook and Twitter, who earn the majority of their advertising revenue from mobiles, are contemplating on how to target customers based on specific weather conditions. This study exploits a field dataset with ten million smartphone users to identify the role of weather in mobile ad effectiveness. Our empirical identification strategy is to isolate the effects of weather after controlling for geographic locations which have different latitudes and altitudes that are naturally correlated with weather conditions. We also check the robustness in results by testing the effects over and beyond wind direction, wind power, temperature extremes and ranges, using different measures for weather, and accounting for weekday vs. weekend conditions, competitive effects, and hazardous conditions. In further dealing with endogenous concerns and ruling out alternative explanations, our identification strategy includes the use of forecasts and unexpected changes in weather. The results indicate that mobile purchases are significantly higher (lower) on days with more sunshine (precipitation) than those on cloudy days. In terms of the odds ratio of purchase likelihood, there is a 31% increase in sunny weather and a 9% decrease in wet weather when compared with cloudy weather, holding other things constant. Survival model analyses at the hourly level suggest that the hazard rate or purchase speed would be 41.93% faster (49.87% slower) in sunny (rainy) weather. With over 150 million users of weather apps, there are 2 billion checks of weather each day. Managers may take actionable steps of avoiding prevention-framing on sunny days but using it on rainy, snowy, foggy, and stormy days to boost the purchase of digital goods on smartphones.