The influence of users' attitudes regarding trust, privacy and control on the adoption of mobile advertising

The mobile device (cellular phone, smartphone, PDA phone) is considered as a primary personal mass media channel that, from the marketing perspective, considerably differs from traditional media like television and the press. For most users, the mobile device is an interactive channel that is always open to receive messages, is carried almost everywhere with the user, and receives their considerable attention regarding incoming messages. The main research goal of this paper was to investigate the potential of the mobile medium as a marketing channel with the focus on the use of the Short Message Service (SMS). A synthesis of recent research on the adoption of mobile and SMS marketing was performed to develop a theoretical model that is presented in the paper, along with the results of an empirical evaluation of this model on a group of 129 college students. The theoretical model was used to create a comprehensive survey that was applied before and after a two-week SMS marketing campaign among the subjects in our study. The data collected in the survey was analyzed with factor analysis, regression analysis, and structural equation modeling (SEM). Finally, an empirically tested model is proposed that is based on the impact of users' attitudes regarding trust, privacy and control on the adoption of SMS/mobile advertising.