Journal of Interactive Marketing

Mobile advertising allows retailers, service providers, and manufacturers to provide consumers with increasingly relevant offers. The success of such campaigns depends on an ever better understanding of environmental, consumer, and technological context variables; a strong focus on advertising goals; accounting for market factors related to the nature of stakeholders and market environment; and the use of appropriate mobile ad elements to improve relevant outcome metrics. This article provides an overarching framework to synthesize current findings in mobile advertising, as well as a research agenda to stimulate additional work in this nascent field.

This work bridges theory and practice on mobile promotions and proposes a research agenda. We do so by first defining mobile promotions and distinguishing them from mobile advertising. We then develop a framework for various stakeholders in the mobile promotion ecosystem. Finally, we advance research questions concerning each stakeholder and view these questions through the lens of several overarching themes that surround mobile promotions, such as the privacy–value tradeoff, return on investment, spatiotemporal targeting, inter-media substitution, and channel and consumer power.

A variety of business sectors have been buffeted by the diffusion of mobile technology, a trend that presents a variety of difficult challenges but interesting opportunities to marketers. One such opportunity is gamification, which, one hopes, will enhance appeal to mobile consumers. Our sense from both personal experience and the literature is that the gamified mobile apps currently offered by firms mostly miss the mark. We provide a systematic overview of game design and note how principles derived from that field are highly applicable to gamification in mobile marketing settings. We are aided by the work of Schell (2008), whose Elemental Game Tetrad Model allows us to offer a coherent look at how gamification should affect mobile marketing outcomes.

The intersection of mobile marketing and shopper marketing, known as mobile shopper marketing, is a rapidly evolving area. We formally define mobile shopper marketing as the planning and execution of all mobile-based marketing activities that influence a shopper along and beyond the path-to-purchase: from the initial shopping trigger, to the purchase, consumption, repurchase, and recommendation stages. However, not much is known about mobile shopper marketing. We plug this gap by first discussing mobile shopper marketing and its scope in depth and then presenting a process model that connects the mobile shopping journey with four key entities, i.e., shopper, employee, organization, and mobile technology. For each of these themes, we identify the challenges that offer future research opportunities.