Mobilizing the brand experience: The adoption and use of mobile media in building consumer relationships in China
Jing Zhao
Creative Industries Faculty Queensland University of Technology
A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), 2011
Supervisors: Distinguished Professor Stuart Cunningham ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, QUT
Professor Judy Drennan Business School, QUT
Associate Professor Michael Keane ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, QUT
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Key words Mobile media; mobile marketing; adoption; innovation; consumer relationship; user-generated content; co-creation; hybrid spaces; China; cross-disciplinary research
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Abstract
This research examines why and how brand owners in China adopt and use mobile media in marketing campaigns to deliver co-creation brand experiences and build consumer relationships. China represents an interesting case to study as it has leapfrogged into the age of consumer society and mobile media adoption. As the largest mobile market globally, it has experienced the intensity of mobile technology diffusion; and with it the rise of mobile consumer culture and participatory culture. Further, the rising individualism and the socio-cultural heritage in collectivism serve as a structuring tension in how mobile media is leveraged in marketing to cater to consumers’ desires for individuality and social interaction.
First, through expert interviews guided by the technology-organization-environment (TOE) framework (Tornatzky & Fleischer, 1990) as well as integrating innovation diffusion theory (E. Rogers, 2003), this research attempts to fill the gap of theoretical application in mobile marketing adoption at the firm level in China, and unravel the adoption factors of mobile marketing by brand owners in China. In total, 27 semi-structured interviews were conducted with key industry informants from mobile agencies, traditional agencies, venture capital firms, mobile content and service providers, mobile portals, and marketing management at brand owners.
Second, based on case studies in China, this research investigates the use of mobile marketing to facilitate innovative co-creation of brand experience to cater to both individualistic as well as collective tendencies and desires amongst Chinese consumers. Through multiple case studies of the campaigns conducted by Nokia, Clean & Clear, and The North Face, and informed by in-depth interviews and document analysis, this research analyses the role of mobile media in marketing campaigns along three dimensions: the role of mobile media in content generation and consumption, the centrality of mobile media as text, tools or platforms; and the interactive environment. Specifically, the cases are organized along the spectrum from user-generated content to corporate-generated content, mobile media’s role from being supplementary to it being central, and from a virtual environment to a hybrid environment. Overall, these cases demonstrate how brand owners adapt mobile media as text, tools, platforms, and environments to deliver co-creation brand experiences exploiting both individualistic as well as collective tendencies and desires amongst Chinese consumers.
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This research contributes to the literature on firm adoption of mobile marketing, and the role of the mobile media in facilitating co-creation experiences for Chinese consumers. It develops a model of the technological, organizational and environmental factors influencing mobile marketing adoption by firms, and provides a model explaining the role of mobile media in facilitating brand experience co-creation. The findings also demonstrate that mobile media can be leveraged to facilitate co-creation brand experience to generate added value; and meanwhile cater to both the rising individualism and the deep-seated collectivism of Chinese consumers.
Empirically, it assists industry practitioners in understanding the adoption of mobile marketing in China, especially those on the supply side in order to improve their offerings and propositions. It also assists brand owners and agencies in designing their mobile marketing strategies to build consumer relationships in China.
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Table of Contents
Key words ...... i Abstract ...... ii Table of Contents ...... iv List of tables and figures ...... viii Glossary of abbreviations and acronyms ...... ix Statement of original authorship ...... xi Acknowledgments ...... xii Chapter 1 Introduction ...... 1 1.1 Background ...... 1 1.1.1 Mobile media and its role in marketing ...... 1 1.1.2 The leapfrog into marketing and mobile media in China ...... 4 1.1.3 Rising individualism and deep-seated collectivism in consumer revolution and participatory culture in China ...... 7 1.2 Research objective and research questions ...... 10 1.3 Research approach ...... 11 1.4 Thesis structure ...... 14 1.5 Contributions of this thesis ...... 15 Chapter 2 Literature Review ...... 17 2.1 Overview of mobile marketing ...... 17 2.1.1 Definition ...... 17 2.1.2 Strengths and drawbacks ...... 18 2.2 Mobile marketing in China ...... 20 2.2.1 Key players ...... 20 2.2.2 Regulations ...... 25 2.2.3 Post-3G era ...... 29 2.3 Organizational adoption of mobile marketing ...... 30 2.3.1 Innovation Diffusion Theory ...... 30 2.3.2 Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) framework ...... 32 2.3.3 Organizational adoption of mobile marketing ...... 35 2.4 Mobile media in consumer empowerment and co-creation experience ...... 41 2.4.1 Mobile media and consumers co-creators ...... 41 2.4.2 Mobile media, place, and hybrid space ...... 43
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2.4.3 Mobile media as text, things, platforms ...... 47 2.4.4. A proposed model of mobile-mediated co-creation brand experience ..... 48 2.5 Conclusion ...... 50 Chapter 3 Methodology and Research Design ...... 52 3.1 Philosophical approach ...... 52 3.2 Research method and design for Study One ...... 53 3.2.1 Rationale for choosing semi-structured interview method ...... 53 3.2.2 Sampling ...... 54 3.2.3 Data collection procedures ...... 56 3.2.4 Data analysis ...... 58 3.3 Research method and design for Study Two ...... 59 3.3.1 Rationale for choosing case studies method ...... 59 3.3.2 The role of theory in case studies ...... 60 3.3.3 Case selection ...... 61 3.3.4 Data collection ...... 63 3.3.5 Data analysis ...... 67 3.4 Ethical consideration ...... 68 3.5 Conclusion ...... 68 Chapter 4 Adoption factors of mobile marketing in China ...... 69 4.1 Technological context ...... 69 4.1.1 Relative advantage ...... 69 4.1.2 Complexity ...... 78 4.1.3 Observability ...... 80 4.1.4 Perceived barrier ...... 81 4.1.5 Compatibility ...... 84 4.2 Organizational Context ...... 86 4.2.1 Innovation orientation ...... 86 4.2.2 Target market fit ...... 87 4.2.3 Organizational readiness ...... 88 4.2.4 Top management support ...... 90 4.2.5 Firm size ...... 90 4.3 Environmental context ...... 92 4.3.1 Competitive pressure ...... 92 4.3.2 Consumer readiness ...... 93
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4.3.3 Market supply ...... 96 4.3.4 Conflicts of interest among industry players ...... 106 4.3.5 Market education ...... 110 4.3.6 Regulatory environment ...... 112 4.4 Discussions ...... 118 4.4.1 Technological Context ...... 120 4.4.2 Organizational Context ...... 122 4.4.3 Environmental Context ...... 123 4.4.4 Conclusion ...... 127 Chapter 5 Nokia E63 Campaign ...... 130 5.1 Introduction ...... 131 5.2 Campaign Background ...... 132 5.3 Campaign cooperative strategies ...... 134 5.4 Corporate generated content ...... 136 5.5 User customization of content ...... 138 5.6 Supplementary role of mobile media ...... 140 5.7 Campaign Outcomes ...... 141 5.8 Conclusion ...... 142 Chapter 6 Nokia Supernova campaign...... 144 6.1 Introduction ...... 144 6.2 Campaign background ...... 146 6.3 Mobile’s role ...... 148 6.3.1 Mobile in the narrative ...... 148 6.3.2 Mobile in co-created experience ...... 151 6.4 Campaign Outcomes ...... 155 6.5 Conclusion ...... 157 Chapter 7 Clean &Clear Clear Fairness Campaign ...... 159 7.1 Introduction ...... 159 7.2 Campaign background ...... 160 7.3 Mobile as supplementary tool and platform for content co-creation ...... 162 7.4 User-generated content ...... 165 7.5 Campaign outcomes ...... 167 7.6 Conclusion ...... 168 Chapter 8 The North Face Red Flag Campaign ...... 170
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8.1 Introduction ...... 170 8.2 Campaign background ...... 173 8.3 Mobile as a central tool & platform in content co-creation in location-based experience ...... 177 8.4 Integration strategy ...... 181 8.5 Campaign outcomes ...... 183 8.6 Conclusion ...... 184 Chapter 9 Nokia Fusion Challenge Campaign ...... 186 9.1 Introduction ...... 186 9.2 Campaign background ...... 188 9.3 Mobile as a supplementary tool and platform for photo-sharing ...... 192 9.4 Mobile as the central tool in task-driven games ...... 194 9.5 Mobile as central tool in collaborative exploration and storytelling of a city ... 198 9.6 User-generated content ...... 200 9.7 Campaign outcomes ...... 201 9.8 Conclusion ...... 202 Chapter 10 Discussion and Conclusions ...... 205 10.1 Main objective and findings of the thesis ...... 205 10.1.1 Main objectives ...... 205 10.1.2 Discussion of main findings ...... 206 10.2 Theoretical and empirical implications ...... 234 10.3 Limitations of the research ...... 237 10.4 Recommendations for future research ...... 237 References ...... 239
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List of tables and figures
Table 1: Program of Research ...... 13 Table 2: Key Players in the Chinese Mobile Media Market……..……..……….…21 Table 3: Five Characteristics Affecting Innovation Diffusion based on Rodgers (2003) ...... 31 Table 4: Previous Studies Using the TOE Framework in Investigation of Organizational Adoption of Technological Innovations ...... 33 Table 5: Previous Research on Adoption of Mobile Marketing by Firms ...... 38 Table 6: Proposed Framework of Factors Influencing Adoption of Mobile Marketing by Firms………………………………………………...... 40 Table 7: List of interviewees ………………………………………………...... 55 Table 8: Revised Framework of Factors Influencing Firms’ Mobile Marketing Adoption………………...... ……………………..…………………….…119 Table 9: A Summary of the Case Campaigns……………………………...... 217 Figure 1: Model of mobile-mediated co-creation brand experiences..……...... 49 Figure 2: Matrix of mobile-mediated co-creation brand experiences ……...... 63 Figure 3: Model of firms’ mobile marketing adoption in China…...... 128
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Glossary of abbreviations and acronyms
2G: Second Generation
2.5G: Second and a Half Generation
3G: Third Generation
3GP: Third Generation Platform
App: Application
AR: Alternative Reality
CDMA: Code Division Multiple Access
CGC: Corporate Generated Content
CP: content providers
CPC: Cost Per Click
CPA: Cost Per Action
CPM: Cost Per thousand impressions
CPS: Cost Per Sales
GPRS: General Packet Radio Service
GPS: Global Positioning System
GSM: Global System for Mobile communication
HTTP: Hyper Text Transfer Protocol
IDT: Innovation Diffusion Theory
IP: Internet Protocol
IMEI: International Mobile Equipment GSM Identity
IVR: Interactive Voice Response
MII: Ministry of Information Industry
MIIT: Ministry of Industry and Information Technology
MMS: Multimedia Messaging Service
SARFT: State Administration of Radio Film and TV
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SDRC: State Development and Reform Commission
SMS: Short Messaging Service
SNS: Social Networking Service
SP: Service Providers
TD-SCDMA: Time Division-Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access
UA: User-Agent
UGC: User Generated Content
WAP: Wireless Application Protocol
WCDMA: Wideband Code Division Multiple Access
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Statement of original authorship
The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted to meet requirements for an award at this or any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made.
Elaine Jing Zhao
Signature:
Date:
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Acknowledgments
A major research project like this is never the work of anyone alone. The contributions of many different people, in their different ways, have made this possible. I would like to extend my deep appreciation especially to the following.
First of all, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the interviewees who offered their valuable time and insight into this study; they are individually named in the list of interviewees in Chapter 2. Special thanks go to Kunal Sinha and Michelle Chen, who offered me the opportunity to spend four months of internship at Ogilvy & Mather Shanghai to observe, to learn and to network.
I can never overstate my gratitude to my supervisors; Stuart Cunningham, for his critical insights, thought-provoking challenges and rigorous scholarship; Michael Keane, for his China insight, wisdom, good conversations, and believing in me; Judy Drennan, for her marketing insights and advice on methodology, making me a better academic writer and connecting me with the advisors and cohorts in Business School. I am also indebted to them for the opportunities of working on diverse exciting projects, the networking with other researchers and practitioners.
I owe much to Dr. Christina Spurgeon and Dr. Lynda Andrews for their encouragement, insights, and challenges. I must also thank Dr. Axel Bruns, Dr. Constanza Bianchi, and Dr. Stephen Cox, who have offered me valuable advice on research design at the formative stage of this research.
I would also like to thank my many student colleagues for all the emotional support and fun times, which helped enrich the experience.
This study was supported by scholarships from QUT, CCI, and iCi, to whom I owe my gratitude.
Last but not least, I wish to thank my parents, Zhigang Zhao and Meizhen Zhang, for their unwavering love and support. To them I dedicate this thesis.
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Chapter 1 Introduction
Invented as a communication device, the mobile phone has gained cultural and commercial dimensions, more so in Asia than elsewhere in the world (Bell, 2005; Manuel Castells, Fernández-Ardèvol, Qiu, & Sey, 2006; Qiu & Thompson, 2007). With the rapid evolution and adoption of mobile phones, companies find themselves asking the question: why and how shall we invest in this new medium?
Since the acceleration of its socialist market economy from1992, China has witnessed a rapid growth in value-driven consumption among people, most notably among urban residents. Now embedded in both the individualistic and collectivist cultures, consumers feel a rising need to actively engage themselves in both self-expression and social interaction (Madden, 2005). In addition, China has also been able to leapfrog ahead in mobile media technologies and culture, which is transforming the media landscape and ushering in fresh opportunities for marketing communications.
Therefore, China presents an exciting opportunity to study the adoption and use by brand owners of mobile media for marketing purposes. Currently, the adoption of mobile marketing by brand owners is still at an early stage. Adoption factors and the role of mobile media in building consumer relationships are not well understood yet.
This thesis unpacks the factors in technological, organizational and environmental contexts that influence brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing. It also examines the role of mobile media in facilitating co-creation brand experiences in China against the background of the rise of mobile media and culture, consumer empowerment, and the rising individualism and the deep-seated collectivism of Chinese consumers.
1.1 Background
1.1.1 Mobile media and its role in marketing
Once a niche market product and a pure communication device, the mobile phone has now turned into a mass market product of communication, entertainment and data control centre with multi-functionality, comparable to a ‘Swiss Army Knife’ (Boyd,
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2005). Since the turn of the century, the number of global mobile subscriptions has grown exponentially, from approximately 740 million in 2000 to over 5 billion by the end of 2010 (International Telecommunication Union (ITU), 2010a). Global 3G mobile subscribers was estimated at 940 million by the end of 2010 (International Telecommunication Union (ITU), 2010b).
Both industry and academia have been turning their attention to the mobile phone as media. Sociologists have conducted research on user adoption and appropriation, and the implications for interpersonal interaction and social behavior (Manuel Castells, et al., 2006; Goggin, 2006; Goggin & Hjorth, 2009; Ito, Okabe, & Matsuda, 2005; J. E. Katz, 2006, 2003, 2008; J. E. Katz & Aakhus, 2002; Ling, 2004; Ling & Pedersen, 2005; Ling & Stald, 2010). The mobile phone is expected to evolve into a tool for marketing. Owing to its high penetration rate, personal nature, ubiquity, interactivity and built-in payment mechanism, Ahonen (2008) claimed the mobile phone as ‘the seventh mass media’ after print, audio recordings, cinema, radio, TV, and Internet. These characteristics of the mobile phone promise great potential in interactive marketing. However, the limited storage and restricted input capabilities, high data rates, narrow bandwidth and its unreliability, and the limited battery time are barriers yet to be overcome (Feldmann, 2006; Spurgeon, 2008).
Since 2007 leading advertising agencies have established their mobile arms, including the purchase of 40% stake acquisition in iconmobile by WPP (Nasdaq: WPPGY); the acquisition of mobile marketing agency Phonevalley by Publicis Groupe (Paris:PUB); the launch of Ansible as the dedicated mobile marketing agency and a joint venture between Interpublic (NYSE: IPG) and Velti (LSE: VEL), a leading mobile technology provider. According to eMarketer (2008), worldwide mobile marketing and advertising spending will reach US$19 billion by 2012, growing from US$2.7 billion in 2007. Asia Pacific spending on mobile advertising will reach a total of US$6.9 billion in 2012, by which time the region could potentially contribute around 36% of global mobile advertising spend (MMA, 2009b).
As the mobile media market becomes more mature with a multiplicity of content and services offered by mobile operators, content providers (CPs) and service providers (SPs), mobile marketing is evolving to accommodate new strategies and purposes. SMS, MMS, mobile Internet, mobile applications, location-based services, among others, are all in the marketer’s toolbox. Mobile media can be used for various marketing purposes. 2
Hairong and Stoller (2007) found, through a field experiment, that exposure to mobile advertising increases brand recall, brand association, and purchase intent. Sultan and Rohm (2005) argued that mobile marketing creates new opportunities for companies to form or shift consumer attitudes toward a brand through the use of value-added content. In addition, research shows that mobile media can be leveraged to build consumer relationships (Nysveen, Pedersen, Thorbjornsen, & Berthon, 2005; Ranjan & Bhatnagar, 2009; Smith, 2009; Valsecchi, Renga, & Rangone, 2007).
While mobile media is good for stand-alone advertising, its integration with traditional media channels brings into play each medium’s unique features and enables complementarity (Nysveen, et al., 2005; A. Wang, 2007). In most cases, mobile media is integrated with other media channels, such as TV, Internet, or out-of-home. The challenge for the marketer is twofold: first is to identify the appropriate techniques and the media best suited to deliver them; second is to execute seamlessly at all contact points (Roberts, 2005).
The mobile lifestyle has exerted a profound influence on consumer culture and accelerated the shift in the power balance between consumers and brand owners. In the past, consumers had little information relative to producers, were isolated from each other and had no collective voice. Therefore, consumers were at a disadvantage as market participants compared to producers, who thought of themselves as top-down communicators, in control of what information is released, to whom and when, as well as the channels of communication themselves (Varey, 2002). Carrying their mobile phones wherever they go, today’s consumers have the capacity to access and contribute content on the go (C. S. Jensen, Vicente, & Wind, 2008) and become a powerful community where they connect with each other (Okazaki, 2009). Therefore the nature of marketing communication is shifting from broadcasting to interaction and engagement. Consumers are increasingly becoming value co-producers (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2005).
Despite optimistic forecasts and potential advantages, brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing is still at an early stage (Wilken & Sinclair, 2009b). This begets the question: what factors influence firms’ adoption of mobile marketing? In addition, brand as a ‘collection of perceptions in the mind of the consumer’ (Bates, 2003) is built through the total experience it offers the consumer. As Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2004) suggested, value is not created for consumers but is rather, co-created with consumers. 3
Sheth and Uslay (2007) proposed an emergent paradigm shift toward co-creative value creation and argued that marketers should consider consumers’ roles as users rather than selectors or buyers. According to Vargo and Lusch and Vargo (2006), the concept of value co-creation consists of two main components: co-production and consumption. The former involves the participation in the creation of the core offering and the latter is the process through which consumer creates and determines value. Value co-creation relies on the consumers’ efforts and engagement and can occur in the form of co-design; co-promotion; co-maintenance or co-consumption (Sheth & Uslay 2007, 305). Co-promotion is more relevant to marketing and new media. For brand owners, however, it still remains unclear how mobile media can be utilized in marketing campaigns to build consumer relationships through co-creation experience.
1.1.2 The leapfrog into marketing and mobile media in China
With the acceleration of the market economy since the early 1990s, China has been able to leapfrog stages of development that took place over a much longer time frame in the West, including in advertising and technology (Ciochetto, 2005).
China’s advertising market was valued at 120 billion RMB in 2008 (15.8 billion USD), with an estimate growth rate of 12% in 2009 (Hou, 2008). According to GroupM (2007), four factors are driving the development of the market. Firstly, China’s economic growth has compounded at an annual average rate of 10% over the past 30 years, and despite the slowdown in 2009 due to financial crisis, this is still a dynamic market environment. Secondly, the 2008 Olympics accelerated media investment; third, rising consumer power translated into increased sales opportunities. Thirdly, per capita disposable income in China grew 120% in urban areas between 2000-2007, from $816 to $1812 currently (WPP, 2008). Last but not least, more and more international brands are vying for access to Chinese consumers. Already the second-largest contributor to ad spending growth behind the USA, China is set to overtake Germany as the world's third-largest advertising market in 2011, primarily driven by increased spending in developing economies and on digital media platforms (ZenithOptimedia, 2011).
Meanwhile new media technologies are transforming the media landscape in China. The shifts (Wei, 2008) are: (1) from passively receiving media content to actively using it; (2) from mass, generic programming to personalizable content; (3) from a single function reading or viewing medium to convergent cross-media platforms (which may 4
be TV, the web or the mobile phone); (4) from using media with a fixed schedule to time-shifting, making it possible to use media 24/7; and (5) from using personalized media content at a fixed location to mobility thanks to space-shifting (e.g., viewing downloaded media content on a portable device). This change in media landscape is ushering in a fresh scene in marketing communications, and the rise of mobile media has accelerated these trends.
According to a Morgan Stanley report on China’s media industry in 2008, new media’s advertising revenue growth far exceeds the traditional media (D. Zhu, 2008). China’s Internet advertising revenue has grown at an average rate of 60% since 2003, while in the case of traditional media, including newspaper and television, growth rate is only just above 10% (D. Zhu, 2008). The report points out that new media has overcome the barriers of time and space and can aggregate more content to attract more users. Mobile media carries these characteristics further, and is a promising advertising channel despite having only a small share of the advertising market.
The GroupM report identifies the Internet as one of the primary engines of ad growth in China, which is China’s fastest-growing medium and is on track to become the second-largest advertising medium after TV within a few years (WPP, 2008). The report predicts that the Internet is expected to command 7.3% of ad investment in 2008, rising to 8.5% next year (WPP, 2008). The convergence of mobile and Internet will also fuel the development of mobile marketing.
As the biggest mobile market in terms of the number of subscribers with rich mobile media cultures, China presents an exciting opportunity to examine firms’ adoption and use of mobile media in marketing in innovative ways. Mobile phones were introduced to China in 1987, and by August 2001, China had overtaken the U.S. in the number of mobile phone users, becoming the largest market in the world (D. P. Liu & Liu, 2006). Since then, China has maintained the momentum of growth, and the mobile subscriber base has reached 641 million with a penetration rate 48.5% at the end of 2008 (MIIT, 2008).
While access to the Internet via computers is less prevalent than many developed countries, growth of mobile Internet usage makes China one of the biggest powerhouses in the world. As the cost of mobile phones and data plans has continued to fall, the number of mobile Internet users increased 113% in 2008, reaching 117
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million, which was almost 40% of Internet users, and over 18% of mobile subscribers (CNNIC, 2009b). The number of mobile Internet users in China hit 303 million by the end of 2010, accounting for 66.2% of the total online users, and is expected to surpass the U.S. population in 2011 (CNNIC, 2010a). Most active mobile media users were aged between 18-30, accounting for 82.5% of the total mobile online users in 2008 (iResearch, 2008). Geographically speaking, the major cities and provinces in mobile content/service consumption are Shanghai, Beijing and Guangdong. Statistics show more than 50% of the total SPs in China are in these regions (J. Li, 2008). The large user base and its continued growth, and the especially pronounced importance of mobiles as media in China (Goggin & Hjorth, 2009), means mobile marketing has plenty of room for growth.
According to iResearch forecasts, mobile marketing market in China was valued at RMB 780 million in 2007, a 85% growth year on year, and would reach RMB 2.2 billion in 2010 (Xie, 2007). Despite the optimistic forecasts and the industry claiming the arrival of ‘the year of mobile marketing’ as early as 2007, the era of mobile marketing has not truly arrived. For most mobile ad companies, brand advertising accounted for a small proportion of their revenue mix (Kuo, 2007). Much of their revenue came from mobile value-added service providers, which sold ring tones, games, screen graphics, and other mobile content. However, there are companies who have come to realize the value of mobile media in consumer brand relationships; for example, MadHouse, China’s leading mobile advertising agency, has moved to brand advertising business, foregoing all revenue from wireless value-added service advertisers. This demonstrates the confidence in the monetization of mobile media through mobile marketing.
Some international and domestic brand owners in China, mainly in Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG), auto, IT, entertainment and fashion sectors, have started to incorporate mobile campaigns into their marketing mix. At the initial stage, mobile marketing was more sales-oriented, with few brand building efforts (In-Stat, 2008). With the rapid growth of marketing and mobile technologies in China, a fast-growing economy with large populations who are more empowered than ever before, mobile media is an emerging opportunity for marketers to build consumer relationships through interactive marketing. However, interactive marketing is gaining interest from brand advertisers, providing the next area of growth after WAP advertising (In-Stat, 2008). However, it still remains unclear what factors influence firms’ adoption of mobile
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marketing, and how mobile media can be leveraged to build consumer relationships through interactive marketing.
1.1.3 Rising individualism and deep-seated collectivism in consumer revolution and participatory culture in China
Since Deng Xiaoping initiated free market reforms in 1979, China has experienced explosive economic growth. Especially since 1992, the market for consumer goods has led to changes that have been described on more than one occasion as a ‘second cultural revolution’ (Dirlik, 2001). The incorporation of the market economy in China is most visible in the emergence of a consumer society. After experiencing a long period of consumer deprivation when the key goals promoted were self-sacrifice and self-abnegation, the Chinese have become willing consumers (Belk & Zhou, 1987). Personal consumption has been identified as a primary driver of economic growth. The Chinese government has started to emphasize the strategic importance of growing domestic consumption market to offset its reliance on low value-added exports to grow the economy since the 11th Five Year Plan (2006-2010), and even more so in the new 12th Five Year Plan (2011-2015).
During this process a transformation has occurred in the popular orientation to the market and market values, evident most importantly in what Li (1998) called a ‘consumer revolution’. He also identified an evolution of consumer preference: a move from pursuing functionality of goods and services during 1978-85 to pursuing quality during 1985-92 to intangible services since 1992 (C. Li, 1998). Consumer aspirations and possessions have changed from consumer durables that made life easier, such as washing machines and refrigerators, to entertainment and products related to leisure activities (Jian Wang, 2000). Consumers increasingly attach greater importance to brand name and social and cultural values of goods or services. This has clear implications for brand owners in terms of marketing strategy and value creation.
Accompanying the growing purchasing power and value-driven consumption pattern, most notable among urban residents, is the rising need for self-expression and the search for individuality. Underlying these is the pursuit of creativity. At the government level, the current embracing of creativity shows the nation’s determination to realize the transformation from “made in China” to “created in China” (Keane, 2007). Creativity becomes a strategy for social and economic reform and pervades every class 7
of society (Sinha, 2008). This is especially true of the single-child generation, which has witnessed the rapid economic transformation, been exposed to a broad range of media, and tends to be more concerned with self. The development of digital technologies has facilitated the need for self-expression and provided a platform for latent creativity. According to a survey conducted by IAC, a leading Internet company, and JWT, the fourth largest advertising agency network in the world, young Chinese aged between 16-25 lead their US peers in digital self-expression, as millions of Chinese are embracing the Internet as a discreet space for their thoughts and emotions (IAC & JWT, 2007). For the Chinese, the Internet represents a steep increase in information and choices available to them, which is nothing like the incremental increase in options for people in liberal democracies such as America. This is a sharp contrast to the past when people were not encouraged to speak their mind. Now, the Internet not only serves as an information source but also as an emotional outlet, a venue for airing opinions, and a space for creativity. According to the statistics released by Data Centre of China Internet (DCCI), in the first half of 2009 and for the first time in history, Chinese Internet users produced more content than professional websites, accounting for 50.7% of the total; professional content accounted for 47.3% of the total (Qiang, 2010).
The mobile phone provides yet another channel for digital-savvy young users to express individuality and taste (Green, 2003). For young consumers in China, mobile phones represent not only a communication device, but also a way to express one’s individuality through items such as customized faceplates, wallpapers, and ring tones (Gao, Sultan, & Rohm, 2010). This need for self-expression and individuality has been driving the robust growth of mobile value-added services in China.
Although individuality is gaining momentum, Chinese cultural heritage and collective values are still important, and modernization and consumerism are adjusted to accommodate the traditional value system (Ciochetto, 2005). In cultural terms, China is seen as a strong collectivist society where group formation and “belongingness” plays an important role in all walks of life (Hall, 1976; Hofstede, 1980; Usunier, 2005). Therefore the cautious desire to express individuality blends with a collectivist culture around communities among the young generation (Madden, 2005). In addition, single children from one-child parents, the post 1980s generation find themselves in what Jing Wang (2008, p. 239) called a “culture of loneliness”, which has led marketers to target youth
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culture by using “metaphors of companionship”. This also leads the young generation to actively engage in a participatory culture in the digital space.
Participatory culture revolving around social media consumption is particularly strong in China. For example, social network services provide platforms for users to unleash their creative urge by uploading and sharing photos, blogs, songs and videos. According to a Microsoft/MTV study, on average, global youth report that 20.4% of their friends are people they have never met in person but only over the Internet. The percentage is even higher in China (S. J. Kim, 2008).
China’s mobile social networking services (SNS) market started in 2004, a few years later than the web-based services. PP.cn and TX.com.cn (previously named WAPTX) were among the first mobile SNS providers. It was still a small market with about 40 million users at the end of 2007 (Guan, 2008). With the launch of 3G in China in 2009, independent WAP portals released SNS channels, and dedicated mobile SNS providers have also emerged. Vertical mobile social services targeting different user groups or interests are trying to avoid homogenous competition and tap the niche market. Various functions of mobile SNS include friend-finding, content sharing, micro-blogging, and location-based service. These platforms provide a space for content creation and sharing for mobile users. Most SPs rely on advertising, premium service subscription or virtual items sales for revenue.
The rapid adoption of mobile media is embedded in such a dynamic interplay of individual and collective culture. As Qiu (2010). insightfully pointed out, “If, as Bauman (2001) contends, the individualization of society is a global trend, then the rise of mobile phone as a ‘personal communication device’ provides yet another technological tool. This is, however, a much more peculiar trend for Asia, given its collectivistic cultural traditions, be it Confucian, Islamic, Hindu, or Buddhist”(p. 222). While evidence from Asian contexts adds greatly to Western literature, much of which builds on the premise that mobile phones are by nature an “individualistic” technology, “the observed pattern in Asia is toward selective re-articulation of certain traditional values based on collective practices toward a transformed (not disbanded) society” (Qiu, 2010, p. 222). Therefore it is important to understand how to cater to both the rising individualism and the deep-seated collectivism of Chinese society with the increasing adoption of mobile media.
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Against the background of consumer revolution in China, consumption has been encouraged as a driving force of economic development. Moreover, consumers are enthusiastically embracing brand culture and pursuing social and cultural values in consumption. The creative urge and participatory culture, though mostly found in urban youth, are widespread in contemporary China. It reflects a rising need for consumers to have their voices heard and their talent discovered, to build their own identities and enhance the connections among each other. For marketers, it is important to cater to the consumer’s desire for uniqueness and personalization on the one hand, and social interaction on the other. Mobile media, owing to its personal nature and social media affordances, has the potential in marketing to meet the needs of Chinese consumers embedded in the rise of an individualistic yet deep-seated collectivist culture.
The rise of mobile media against this background in China begs the question: what role can mobile media play in marketing to facilitate interaction with consumers in such a culture?
1.2 Research objective and research questions
With an increasing amount of research in recent years on mobile marketing, initial efforts in academia have been devoted to studying adoption at the individual consumer level, such as consumer attitudes toward mobile marketing (Dickinger & Kleijnen, 2008; Okazaki, 2008; D. J. J. Xu, 2006). These studies have significantly expanded our knowledge frontier. However, research at firm level is relatively limited and fragmented. In addition, much literature centres on permission-based SMS advertising (Okazaki, Katsukura, & Nishiyama, 2007). Despite all the possibilities embodied in mobile media, other forms of mobile marketing are not well understood and therefore need to be examined, especially regarding interactive marketing through co-creation brand experiences (In-Stat, 2008).
The objective of this research, therefore, is to address the aforementioned literature gap and unravel the complexities in firms’ decision to adopt mobile marketing, and examine how adopters use mobile media in marketing campaigns to build consumer relationships through co-creation brand experiences in China. The importance of the research focus on China is warranted for the following reasons.
1) Given China’s status as the world’s largest mobile market by subscribers and mobile Internet users, it is important to understand what factors influence brand 10
owners’ adoption of mobile marketing, and how mobile marketing can help to connect and interact with their target consumers in this emerging consumer market.
2) The rapidly evolving mobile technology markets in China present the opportunity to examine a rich palette of mobile marketing forms, beyond the dominance of SMS. Businesses in China have the opportunity to lead innovation in mobile marketing, rather than following Western practices.
3) Chinese consumers’ increasing pursuit of value-driven consumption, their need for self-expression, individuality and social interaction, and their empowerment, driven by mobile media, most notably among urban youth, provide a fertile ground to examine how brand owners leverage mobile marketing to facilitate co-creation experiences for their target consumers.
The overall research question in the thesis is stated as follows:
Why and how do firms innovatively adopt mobile media in marketing to build consumer relationships through co-creation brand experiences in a rapidly evolving mobile media market in China?
This can be broken down into the following two research questions:
Research Question 1. What factors influence the adoption of mobile marketing by firms in China?
Research Question 2. How and to what effect do firms use mobile media in marketing campaigns to facilitate co-creation brand experiences to cater to Chinese consumers’ desires for individuality and social interaction?
1.3 Research approach
Through a thematic meta-analysis of recent research publications about the Internet, Kim and Weaver (2002) found that the vast majority of research published in mainstream communication journals failed to apply a theory (S. Kim & Weaver, 2002). This problem seems to be more evident in published new media research in China, as few articles had a theoretical framework or mechanism to explain the processes of new media diffusion and the consequences of new media use on individuals, organizations, and society at large (Wei, 2009). 11
This research begins with Study One through semi-structured interviews with key industry informants in order to address Research Question One. It is my contention that brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing hinges on a variety of factors beyond technological dimensions. This study takes a holistic approach to the question under the guidance of Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) framework (Tornatzky & Fleischer, 1990). In addition, Innovation Diffusion Theory (IDT) (E. Rogers, 2003) and previous research on organizational adoption of mobile marketing also informed a preliminary list of adoption factors (See Table 6 in Chapter 3). This was used as a guide in interviews conducted for Study One. Thematic coding was used to analyse the data obtained from interviews. Study One aims to achieve two objectives:
1) To develop a model of technological, organizational, and environmental factors which influence consumer brands’ adoption of mobile marketing in China.
2) To identify the opportunities and challenges in brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing in China.
To address Research Question Two, Study Two investigates five cases in China where brand owners used mobile media in marketing campaigns to build a consumer relationship by facilitating co-creation experience. It has three objectives:
1) To investigate the specific role of mobile media in the marketing campaigns in terms of facilitating co-creation brand experiences to cater to Chinese consumers’ dual desires for individuality and social interaction.
2) To examine the impact of relevant mobile marketing strategies.
3) To examine the factors leading to mobile marketing adoption in each case and test the results derived from Study One.
The methods and research designs for the two studies in this thesis are summarized as follows and are depicted in Table 1.
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TABLE 1
Program of Research Why and how do firms innovatively adopt mobile media in marketing to build Overall Research Question consumer relationships through co-creation brand experiences in rapidly evolving mobile media market in China? Research Questions Research Analysis Objectives of The Study Methods Method Study One Semi-structured To develop a model of technological, organizational, and interviews environmental factors which influence firms’ adoption of RQ.1 Thematic mobile marketing in China. What factors influence the adoption of (key informants of coding To identify the opportunities and challenges in firms’ mobile marketing by firms in China? mobile marketing adoption of mobile marketing in China. industry in China)
Study Two To investigate the specific role of mobile media in the RQ.2 5 Case Studies marketing campaigns in terms of facilitating co-creation How and to what effect do firms use brand experiences to cater to Chinese consumers’ dual mobile media in marketing campaigns (In-depth desires for individuality and social interaction. to facilitate co-creation brand interviews; Explanation experiences to cater to Chinese Document analysis) building; To examine the impact of relevant mobile marketing consumers’ dual desires for Cross-case strategies. individuality and social interaction? synthesis
To examine the factors leading to mobile marketing adoption in each case and test the findings derived from Study One.
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1.4 Thesis structure
This thesis comprises 10 chapters. The remainder of the thesis is organized as follows:
Chapter 2 reviews the relevant literature to bring up arguments to support the research focus. It begins by clarifying the definition of mobile marketing, followed by a contextual review of China’s mobile marketing market. Then it reviews literature on innovation diffusion theory, Technology-Organization-Environment framework, and organizational adoption of mobile marketing, and proposes a model of factors leading to the adoption of mobile marketing by consumer brands in China, which guides Study One. Following that, it reviews the literature on consumer empowerment and value co-creation before presenting a model of mobile-mediated co-creation brand experience along three dimensions: content generation, centrality of mobile media, and interactive environment. The model serves as the basis of the matrix where case studies analysed from Chapter 5 to Chapter 9 in Study Two are located in its different quadrants.
Chapter 3 explains how the research study was designed and implemented. First, it addresses the philosophical approach of this research. Then it presents research methods and designs for Study One and Study Two, including the rationale of choosing the research method, data collection, data analysis. Methodological limitations of selected techniques and the strategies to establish and enhance validity and reliability are also discussed.
Chapter 4 presents the findings resulting from the interviews with key informants regarding consumer brands’ adoption of mobile marketing in China. Interviewees come from mobile marketing solution providers/agencies, traditional agencies, venture capital firms, mobile content/service providers, brand owners and independent consultants. Secondary data were used to complement the interview data. The findings were organized under the guidance of TOE framework in three sections: technological context, organizational context, and environmental context. A model of firms’ mobile marketing adoption in China is developed based on the findings.
Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 examine two cases delivering individual experience based on corporate generated content: the Nokia E63 mobile novel campaign 14
(Chapter 5) and the Nokia Supernova Campaign (Chapter 6). The former provided a customized reading experience in virtual space, and the latter facilitated a transmedia content consumption experience in hybrid space. Mobile assumed a supplementary role in these campaigns as content consumption tool. However, it played an important role in the branded content as a narrative device, more so in the Nokia Supernova Campaign.
Chapter 7, 8, and 9 present three cases delivering collective experience based on user-generated content. The Clean & Clear Clear Fairness Campaign (Chapter 7) engaged consumers in collaborative creation of a novel via a microblog relay, where the mobile served as a supplementary tool and platform for content co-creation. The TNF Virtual Red Flag Campaign (Chapter 8) and the Nokia Fusion Challenge (Chapter 9) foregrounded the location awareness of mobile media and delivered collective experience in hybrid spaces. The Nokia Fusion Challenge Campaign facilitated more user interaction and demonstrated the ongoing change and dynamics in the concept and practice of communities in China.
Chapter 10 discusses key findings arising in the previous chapters, and draws out the implications for both theory and practice in mobile marketing. Limitations of the research and recommendations for future research are also discussed.
1.5 Contributions of this thesis
This research seeks to contribute to both mobile marketing theory and practice. By integrating Rogers’ theory of diffusion of innovation (2003) and Tornatzky and Fleischer’s TOE framework (1990) to investigate firms’ adoption of mobile marketing in China, this research responds to the call for more research of theoretical application in new media research (S. Kim & Weaver, 2002; Wei, 2009). It attempts to identify the facilitators and inhibitors influencing the adoption of mobile marketing by consumer brands and present a model of firms’ mobile marketing adoption in China. It also aims to deliver empirical insights and evidence through case studies of mobile marketing adoption and use in China. Further, this research attempts to contribute to the knowledge on the role of mobile media in facilitating co-creation brand experiences, and in catering to Chinese consumers’ dual desires for individuality and social interaction.
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Empirically, this research aims to provide practitioners with an understanding of the drivers and barriers for brand owners to adopt mobile marketing; those on the supply side can leverage this knowledge to improve their offerings and propositions, and work together to drive the development of the mobile marketing industry. Further, this research attempts to provide practitioners with knowledge about the role of mobile marketing in delivering co-creation brand experiences and in addressing the rising individualism and the deep-seated collectivism in Chinese consumers. This may assist brand owners who are vying in the Chinese market to design their mobile strategies in building consumer relationships.
1.6 Summary
This chapter has outlined the key aspects of the research program. It includes the background (Section 1.1), research rationale and research questions (Section 1.2), research approach (Section1.3), thesis structure (Section 1.4), and the contributions that this thesis can make to further knowledge (Section1.5). The next chapter integrates the literature from various disciplines to build the conceptual framework.
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Chapter 2 Literature Review
Chapter 1 outlined the overall program of research in this thesis. It aims to investigate why and how businesses innovatively adopt mobile media in marketing to build consumer relationships in the rapidly evolving mobile media market in China. The purpose of this chapter is to review relevant literature and arguments that support the research focus. The structure of Chapter 2 is as follows: Section 2.1 examines the definition of mobile marketing; Section 2.2 provides a contextual review of China’s mobile marketing market; Section 2.3 reviews literature on innovation diffusion theory, Technology-Organization-Environment framework, and organizational adoption of mobile marketing, and proposes a model of factors leading to the adoption of mobile marketing by consumer brands in China; Section 2.4 addresses consumer empowerment and value co-creation, which is broken down into consumers’ role as co-creators and mobile’s role in co-creation environment before presenting the model of mobile-mediated co-creation brand experience. This serves as the foundation for the matrix of mobile-mediated co-creation brand experiences for case studies; Section 2.5 provides a conclusion to this chapter.
2.1 Overview of mobile marketing
2.1.1 Definition
Over the past few years an increasing body of literature has emerged on mobile marketing (e.g. S.J. Barnes & Scornavacca, 2004; Facchetti, Rangone, Renga, & Savoldelli, 2005) or mobile commerce/business (Cai et al., 2008; Denk & Hackl, 2004) that touches on the issue of mobile marketing communication. Meanwhile well-known consumer brands such as Coca-Cola, Pepsi, MTV, Nike, Disney and Johnson & Johnson have adopted mobile marketing to reach their target consumers. Despite increasing interest among academics and practitioners, the theory development, especially the conceptualizations of mobile means of commercial communication, suffer from a lack of attention (Tähtinen, 2005). Tähtinen (2005) argued that terms like mobile marketing and mobile advertising are being used interchangeably without explicit and agreed definition. In their detailed review of mobile marketing research, Leppäniemi, Sinisalo, and Karjaluoto (2006) observed that marketing communications in mobile media has, implicitly or explicitly, been conceptualized as (1) mobile marketing, (2) mobile advertising, (3) wireless marketing, and (4) wireless advertising. In addition, each of 17
these terms is defined in various ways. In all, there were 21 different definitions of mobile marketing in the studies surveyed.
Recognizing the need to address the conceptual confusion, Tähtinen (2005) analysed elements of traditional advertising and marketing, and compares these to mobile advertising and marketing. He argued that the term “mobile advertising” does not address the interactive and personal elements that mobile devices bring in. The term mobile marketing seems to be used to describe only one part of the marketing definition, namely the communication of value. Tähtinen (2005) then suggested two alternatives: m-adcom/madcommunication and mobile marketing communication. The former highlights the importance of mobile media being used only when it suits the purpose. The latter suggests that mobile media may serve the same purpose as advertising, personal selling, public relations, customer relationship management, and sales promotion, depending on its aim and use. Tähtinen’s purpose was to conceptualize the phenomenon of “sending and receiving commercial messages to mobile devices” (Tähtinen, 2005:154), therefore it is still limited considering the evolving nature of mobile media and marketing.
To emphasize the interactive nature and the evolved capabilities of mobile marketing, this research adopts the term “mobile marketing” and the definition by Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) (2009a): “a set of practices that enables organizations to communicate and engage with their audience in an interactive and relevant manner through any mobile device or network.”
2.1.2 Strengths and drawbacks
Mobile marketing in existing literature is most often categorized by technologies such as IVR, SMS, MMS, and WAP, etc.; or by initiation, including push-based, pull-based and interactive-based (Haig, 2002; Scharl, Dickinger, & Murphy, 2005). Based on the aims of mobile advertising campaigns, Barwise & Strong (2002) identified six types of mobile advertising: brand building, special offers, timely media teasers, product, service or information requests, competitions and polls. Recognizing the lack of categorization of mobile marketing linking to objectives, Pousttchi and Wiedemann (2006) developed a mobile marketing framework based on case studies of mobile marketing campaigns and interviews with leading European mobile marketing experts. They identified relevant characteristics of mobile marketing campaigns as follows: 18
initiation, supporting media, added value, cost, opt-in method, degree of interactivity, mobile communication technology, enabling technology, and positioning technology. Their mobile marketing framework categorizes mobile marketing along two dimensions: four methods of adding consumer value (information, entertainment, raffle, coupon) and six campaign objectives (building brand awareness, changing brand image, sales promotion, enhancing brand loyalty, building customer database, mobile word-of-mouth). This framework contributes to the categorization of mobile marketing by synthesizing campaign classification, characteristics and objectives.
The attributes inherent to mobile marketing, i.e. personalization, ubiquity, interactivity and localization, generate significant potential for innovative marketing (Stuart J. Barnes, 2002; S.J. Barnes & Scornavacca, 2004; Barwise & Strong, 2002; Bauer, Reichardt, Barnes, & Neumann, 2005; Facchetti, et al., 2005). Owing to its personal nature, high penetration and ubiquity mobile technology is an ideal medium for supporting relationship marketing (Advani & Choudhury, 2001). As a personal device carried by consumers, mobile offers the opportunity to build interactive relationships by identifying consumers, not only in terms of personal identity but also in terms of commercial behaviour, geographic location, and social and communication patterns (Friedrich, Gröne, Hölbling, & Peterson, 2009). Further, mobile marketing can be more cost-effective than other media owing to the high response rate of consumers (Scharl et al., 2005).
However, some concerns regarding mobile marketing are widely acknowledged. The personal nature of mobile media raises social concerns, such as privacy invasion arising from the collection and use of personal details (Evans, 2003). It is potentially even more intrusive than other interactive marketing channels, and irrelevant messages can be seen as spam and interruption (Barwise & Strong, 2002). Spamming and privacy invasion are perceived as central issues related to consumers’ willingness to receive mobile advertisements (S.J. Barnes & Scornavacca, 2004; Grant & O'Donohoe, 2007; Leppäniemi & Karjaluoto, 2005). As Scharl et al. (2005) pointed out, there is a trade-off between personalization and consumer control. Further, network charges involved to maintain such dialogue may deter consumers, unless the marketer offers continuing incentives (Spurgeon, 2008). Other limitations include small screen size, low resolution, and limited input mechanisms, limited processing capability (V. Venkatesh, Ramesh, & Massey, 2003), which deliver primitive and unfriendly brand experience that are, at worst,
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a detraction from the brand’s value and equity (Helenius & Liljander, 2005). With the emergence and growing adoption of smart phones with larger screens, higher resolutions and touch screens, user experience is improving. This presents a greater opportunity to leverage the particularities of mobile media to engage consumers in the brand experience.
It has been argued that mobile devices should be used as a channel addition integrated into other campaigns rather than as stand-alone channels to develop deep personal relationships between brands and consumers (IAB, 2008; Steinbock, 2005). For example, Scharl et al. (2005) argued that mobile media mobile advertising only succeeds when embedded in the marketing mix. Wang (2007) identified the cross-media effect of the integration of SMS messages and website that featured relevant advertising messages on perceived media engagement, message strength, and brand attitudes. Leppäniemi, Karjaluoto, Sinisalo, and Salo (2006) conceptualized a model that links the use of database information and mobile media to develop interactive and integrated marketing communication strategies.
While research shows mobile marketing contributes to various marketing objectives, including building consumer relationship, the adoption of mobile marketing among consumer brands is still at an early stage. It still remains unclear what factors influence firms’ adoption of mobile marketing, and how mobile media can be leveraged to build consumer relationship through interactive marketing.
2.2 Mobile marketing in China
2.2.1 Key players
Seeing the potential of mobile marketing, operators, device manufacturers, service and content providers, traditional advertising agencies, mobile marketing solution providers and third party monitoring service providers are all key players assisting brand owners to communicate with their consumers. The key players are presented in Table 2.
Facing declining revenue from voice service, operators need to seek new revenue sources and recoup the huge investment in network infrastructure. Therefore they actively engage themselves in developing mobile value added services. According to the Research Institution of China Mobile, operators had over 60 value added services in
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store by 2008 (Huang & Zhang, 2008). They also need to pull the best content and services onto their platform to attract and retain subscribers. Mobile marketing is also a potential revenue source. Their user databases are a precious resource and are most attractive to service and content providers and advertisers, either to improve the content or service or to conduct personalized and interactive mobile marketing campaigns. In addition, operators’ micropayment billing capability is also their legacy strength (Ahonen, Kasper, & Melkko, 2004). TABLE 2 Key Players in the Chinese Mobile Media Market Key players Firms Operators China Mobile, China Unicom, China Telecom Device Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Lenovo, Sony Ericsson, Shanzhai manufacturers device makers, Apple, HTC Service/content Portals: 3g.QQ.com (Tencent), Sina, Baidu, Monternet, Sohu, providers 3g.cn, Kong.net, tx.com.cn Mobile literature: Shanda Literature Mobile location-based services: Sifang, Jiepang, and Kaikai Mobile video: Youku, Tudou Mobile game: Pearlinpalm, Hurray!, DigiFUN Mobile social networking services: kaixin001, renren Mobile app stores: MM-Ovi (China Mobile and Nokia), China Unicom App Store, China Telecom App Store, Shop4Apps (Motorola), Samsung Apps Micro-blogging: Sina, Tencent, Sohu, Netease Advertising WPP (iconmobile), Publicis (Phonevalley), Interpublic, Carat, group/traditional Wwwins, Carat agencies Mobile marketing Madhouse, CASEE, Velti, MMX China, UUCun, Lmobile, solution Youmi, Domob, Fractalist providers/agencies Third-party mWebTracker (developed by iResearch and Madhouse) monitoring service providers
In March 2006, the biggest operator in China, China Mobile, partnered with Fractalist, a pioneer in mobile marketing in China which started its business in 2003. As the exclusive mobile marketing partner of China Mobile, Fractalist has the exclusive operation rights for advertising on every channel of Monternet, China Mobile’s own WAP portal. This is similar to the model of Japanese agency D2 Communications, which owns the exclusive operation rights regarding advertising on i-mode of Docomo. Advertising on an operator’s portal is still a walled garden. With the evolution of mobile marketing, it started to offer WAP site construction services and interactive mobile
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marketing solutions (Fractalist China Inc., 2009). Following China Mobile, China Unicom, the second largest mobile operator in the country, also entered into the mobile advertising business in 2006 with its subsidiary China Unicom NewSpace Co. Ltd. It provides mobile advertising services in the forms on WAP and via SMS, MMS, IVR and pre-installation (China Unicom NewSpace Co. Ltd., 2009).
While operators still dominated the mobile market, they saw their control on the industry lessen as other parties such as independent WAP sites sought various ways to circumvent the operators. Moreover, mobile browsers have made the whole Internet available to users rather than keeping an operator’s portal as the homepage (O'Hear, 2008). It is an inevitable trend that operators cooperate with other market participants to provide a platform service for them as well as mobile content and service users, and mobile marketing businesses.
Device manufacturers, seeing their revenue and profits declining, are either making strategic transformations to mobile Internet service providers or are cooperating closer with operators to deliver made-to-order mobile phones (Hu, 2008). While an effective way to strengthen competitiveness and to expand revenue sources, device manufacturers seeking business in the mobile Internet services obviously have conflicts with operators. Therefore the two parties are competing and cooperating at the same time.
Service providers (SP) in China entered into mobile business in 1998 when China Mobile launched short messaging services (SMS), and became partners of the operator when China Mobile launched Monternet in 2000. They experienced explosive growth owing to the rapid development of the mobile value-added service market. Those SPs with outstanding business results, such as Netease.com, Kong.net and Linktone, got listed in NASDAQ. However, forced subscription, illegal content, non-transparent charging standard, unlicensed operation and spamming were rampant in the market. Such practice was also found among WAP sites, which provided free content for users while obtaining revenue from advertising. These sites have witnessed strong growth since 2004 and has led government regulatory bodies and operators to clamp down on such practices (MII, 2004, 2006). Meanwhile, as operators came to realize the value of quality content and started direct cooperation with CPs on a revenue-sharing basis, SPs saw their profit going down (J. C. Li, 2006a). The resulting rapid demise of the traditional SPs has created a healthier mobile media environment. The surviving SPs, however, still faced tough competition and needed to develop their own core 22
competitiveness through service innovation. According to Morgan Stanley (2009), China is home to a vibrant mobile value-added service market, a major force in driving global mobile data usage. Mobile marketing could be an opportunity for SPs just as the growing mobile service market would benefit mobile marketing adoption.
Content providers have become more important as operators, and SPs realize quality content means traffic, which leads to revenue and advertising dollars. Print, music labels, Internet content providers and aggregators have started to cooperate with mobile media SPs and operators to create a new platform for offering content. Each party benefits from the cooperation, as CPs can add a new channel for content and realize cross-media interaction with users, and SPs and operators can attract more users through quality content. This has given rise to the pursuit of copyrighted professional content, and repurposing it for the mobile media, for example mobile music (Linktone, 2005; Shanda, 2006), and mobile video (Tudou, 2009; Youku, 2009).
Traditional advertising agencies started to buy mobile media solution providers, or to outsource the business where they had no specialist knowledge or experience. For example, GroupM formed a strategic partnership with the mobile ad network Madhouse in July 2008, and Ogilvy partnered with German mobile specialist iconmobile to create a Chinese joint venture in November 2008. While mobile advertising still counted little in traditional advertising agencies’ revenue, mobile marketing solution providers were moving faster than traditional advertising agencies. Their main services included campaign design and management, messaging platform operation, WAP site design and optimization, media buying, and effectiveness monitoring. They often cooperated with publishers, mainly operator portals, off-portal WAP sites, user communities clustering around vertical sites, and on-device portals.
The first third-party monitoring system mWebTracker in China was co-developed by mobile ad network Madhouse and the online market research company iResearch. Launched in August 2009, the platform allows advertisers to track ads in real time on mobile Internet to evaluate the effectiveness of selected sites and ad versions. In addition, it allows advertisers to analyse users by geography, handset brand and retail price segment. At this initial stage, it is distributed among mobile marketing agencies or solution providers such as mobile ad networks for their clients for free use. Overall, the third-party monitoring service is only just emerging in the market.
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The mobile media market is driven by a number of technical, regulatory, commercial, social and legal components. It is a complex network of different industries and companies, and some of them are new players in the field. Moreover, each participant can assume multiple roles (Feldmann, 2005). The mobile marketing ecosystem requires a diverse array of intermediaries between brands and consumers that all have a role in delivering a marketer’s message to its intended audience. Traditional advertising agencies, mobile marketing solution providers, SPs, CPs, and operators are all stakeholders in this still evolving landscape. In mobile marketing it takes cross-industry effort to make the ecosystem easier for each party to navigate.
The traditional linear value chain (Porter, 1985) has lost its relevance because firms are part of larger value creation systems (Möller & Svahn, 2003). Parolini (1999) put forward the concept of “value net”, which consists of many different actors, each concentrating only on core competencies; partnering is the major point of success. This concept is more appropriate for industries where a firm’s internal processes are less important than the multiple ways in which businesses and customers are connected to each other. Such industries include advertising (Normann & Ramirez, 1994), and the Internet (Afuah & Tucci, 2002). Möller, Rajala, & Svahn (2005) extended this even further through the concept of “strategic net”, which is characterized by the search for innovation (Svahn, 2004). An emerging net involves old and new actors (Möller & Svahn, 2003). Strategic net differs from value net in the way that the value system is not clearly structured and is, therefore, totally different from creating value, for example, in the garment industry, where value creating activities are established and relatively stable, while value net is formed to create concrete and well known value (Möller, et al., 2005). To understand brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing in such a complicated market environment, it is necessary to examine the role of different stakeholders in the emerging ecosystem and their interests and concerns in driving mobile marketing adoption.
As an industry with both incumbent and new entrants participating in emerging businesses, both government and industry regulations play an important part in industry development. The next section presents a review of the regulations on mobile operators, mobile service/content providers, mobile marketing spamming, mobile marketing standards as well as mobile Internet standards.
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2.2.2 Regulations
Regulations on mobile operators. From March 1998 till March 2008, the primary regulatory body for the telecommunications industry in China was Ministry of Information Industry (MII), the result of the merger of the former Ministry of Post and Telecommunications and the former Ministry of Electronics Industry. It was later replaced by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT).
During its ten years of operation, MII made a number of initiatives to promote the development of the telecommunications industry and regulated the market for fair competition. It issued over 20 important policies and regulations, promoting “asymmetrical regulatory policies,” and introduced market mechanisms to foster competition in the mobile communication industry. Another duty of MII was to hold joint public hearings with the State Development and Reform Commission (SDRC) on the pricing of telecommunication services, inviting public participation and monitoring.
By international standards and common practice, MII as a regulatory body had serious drawbacks (J. H. Wang, 2005). First of all, it did not have a well-founded legal basis, since it was a work unit under the State Council instead of a regulatory body with legally sanctioned and clearly defined roles and responsibilities. Secondly, the MII lacked specialized industry regulatory functions. It regulated not only the telecommunications industry but also other electronic manufacturing industries. Thirdly, MII did not have the authority to be an independent regulatory body. On the one hand, it directly took orders from the State Council, as key initiatives and projects must be approved by the State Council. On the other hand, it was also subject to horizontal constraints and interference from other ministries, such as the SDRC, which had more power in setting the prices for telecommunication services. Interference also came from State-owned Assets Supervision & Administration Commission (SASAC), which was established in March 2003 as a shareholder in all state-owned carriers, and naturally focused more on pursuing return on investment.
Regulations on mobile service/content providers. The lack of industry regulation at the initial stage of the mobile media market development in China resulted in forced subscription, illegal content, unclear charging standards and unlicensed operation. SPs became another name for fraud. In April 2004, MII issued “Notice on Certain Issues Regarding Regulation of Short Message Services”. The Notice banned 25
operators providing SMS platforms for unlicensed SPs, and required operators and SPs to highlight fee standards and payment methods in the advertisement of SMS; furthermore, no short messages could contain content forbidden by the government (MII, 2004). These administrative regulations required technical means on operators’ part to be effectively implemented. China Mobile subsequently launched the mobile information service centre (MISC) platform, where the operator could monitor the SMS and WAP service once the user subscribed to the service. Through this system, China Mobile supervised and regulated SP behaviour. As a result, most small and medium-sized SPs went out of business, and even the remaining large SPs saw their revenue decrease by more than 40% (J. C. Li, 2006b).
When off-portal WAP service started to gain growth in 2004, and competition became more fierce in 2005, many SPs resorted to illicit operations, relying on spamming, charging monthly fees without consumer awareness or consent, disguised subscription confirmation, and deceiving content (N. Li, 2002). This led to strong complaints and a high level of scepticism among consumers, who later equated any mobile offer or advertising with fraud.
This activity put operators on alert. In 2005, China Mobile prohibited service providers from advertising on any other WAP site except on its own portal, Monternet. Further, the carrier stopped providing mobile phone numbers and User-Agent (UA) Profiles1 to WAP sites which were not preferred partners on the white list, in an effort to protect user privacy and clamp down on spamming (Zou, 2005). The list included big SPs such as Sina, Tencent, Kong, and Tom. Free WAP sites which did not have access to the data found it a hard blow to their business, including mobile marketing. Some WAP sites were less affected as they asked users to provide mobile numbers and mobile models for optimization purposes. The operator’s policy gave rise to the phenomenon whereby companies relied on their white list status to provide user data to other WAP sites. Such underground practice gave SPs access to user data, which can be used for good or bad purposes.
1 A User Agent Profile describes the capabilities of a mobile handset, including Vendor, Model, screen size, multimedia capabilities, character set support, and more, which enables service providers to optimize user experience.
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In May 2006, MII (2006) issued “Notification Regarding the Regulation of Charges and Fees for Mobile Information Services”, commonly known as “document 574” to further clamp down on malpractice in the market. This was a severe measure taken by the government in regulating the SP market environment, particularly clamping down on forced subscription, unclear charging standards, etc. Further, the unification of SP service codes and the real name system for mobile phones were introduced to curtail fraudulent, pornographic and unsolicited messages (MII, 2006). Later that year, China Mobile and China Unicom put forward policies that placed hurdles in the way of China’s off-portal WAP sites. They were required to ask users to re-confirm the subscription after one month of subscription; to extend free period for subscription service, which was later cancelled because consumers lost the urge to purchase the service after the extended free period; and to clear up inactive user profiles from the database.
In 2006 more than 1600 SPs were punished, 680 by various levels of telecom regulatory and supervisory departments and 973 by operators (Q. Liu, 2007) . These SPs were either required to stop charging or to end the illegal service, otherwise their contract with operators would be terminated. Although this impacted China Mobile’s business to an extent, it was far less significant than the impact on SPs. According to China Mobile statistics, as a result of the re-confirmation policy, SPs’ revenues from new subscription decreased 70-80% on average, and total revenue went down around 20% (J. C. Li, 2006b).
This illustrates that relevant government policies play an important role in regulating not only the telecommunications industry but also mobile media market, especially in terms of mobile content and service provision. Mobile operators devised technological and administrative means to implement the policies. This was not only in operators’ own interests but also for the benefit of the whole mobile industry in terms of gaining consumer trust and promoting mobile media consumption.
Regulations on spamming in mobile marketing. The incredibly low cost for advertisers is one of the major reasons of the die-hard spamming practice. The spam sending equipment can be easily found at electronic markets or online, costing a hundred to a few thousand yuan. Such technology that can use 32 phone cards to send messages simultaneously costs 6000 yuan. Each phone card, costing 25 yuan, can send 700 messages within one hour. With one piece of equipment costing 800 yuan, 22,400 27
messages can be sent in an hour. It costs only about 0.03 yuan to send one message (Duan & Li, 2011).
According to the China Consumers Association, SMS-based spam was one of the issues which triggered the largest number of complaints from consumers in 2007 (InterfaxChina, 2008). The phenomenon gained nationwide attention when, on May 15, 2008, World Consumer Day, an investigative program on China Central Television exposed the SMS spamming practice by NASDAQ-traded Focus Media’s mobile advertising subsidiary, Focus Wireless. The company was accused of not only sending the majority of spam advertising messages in the country but of also illegally acquiring consumer information from third parties to compile a user database of over 200 million mobile phone subscribers and using this consumer information without consent (InterfaxChina, 2008). Moreover, some provincial companies under China Mobile were accused of illegally selling subscriber information for business gain. This infuriated the Chinese public as many realized their private information might have been intentionally leaked or even sold without their consent (Duan & Li, 2011). In June 2008 MII initiated a special project in June 2008 to crack down on SMS spamming and, meanwhile, asked mobile operators to conduct a nationwide audit of operations.
On the part of the operators, China Mobile and China Telecom launched a dedicated service number for users to report, via SMS, the mobile number sending the spam. Once a mobile number was reported, the subscriber would no longer receive spam from that number. However, for average mobile subscribers, this bottom-up approach was only responsive in nature and could hardly prevent spamming from various sources. In fact, as the spammers used operators’ networks, spamming brought no small revenue to mobile operators, which explained why operators did not take proactive measures to curtail spamming. What was worse, on the World Consumer Day in the following year, CCTV exposed spam messaging practices and abuse of consumer information by China Mobile Shandong Branch. China Mobile became the centre of accusations. Following the exposure, in June 2009, all the three operators signed the agreement to control the SMS spam problem by imposing limits on text messaging. Under the restrictions, a phone number was limited to sending no more than 200 messages per hour and 1000/day on weekdays.
Despite relevant administrative and technical measures to address the issue, according to the 2010 Survey Report on the mobile SMS usage in China (China Internet 28
Society, 2010), users received 12 spamming messages per week on average, and only 0.7% of users said they had never received spam. The ineffective regulation through administrative and technical measures called for action to fill the legislative gap. For example, there was no legal regulation regarding the transactions regarding spam senders and private information. Considering the large market size and the lack of a dedicated regulatory body, administrative measures by government and mobile operators were hard to implement and they had less than satisfactory results, not to mention that operators themselves benefited from spamming.
2.2.3 Post-3G era
Accompanying the restructuring of the telecom sector, three nationwide operators were awarded 3G licenses supporting three different standards in January 2009. China Unicom received a license for the international and mature WCDMA standard, offering the fastest network and most supported in terms of device technology. China Telecom received the license for CDMA2000 standard popular in the United States, and China Mobile received the license for China’s home-grown TD-SCDMA standard. It was believed that 3G would drive innovation in mobile content and services such as location-based services, which would then attract and retain users who were not active on mobile web due to a lack of rich content and services (Y. L. Zhang & Ma, 2009). User experience of the mobile Internet services would improve as well.
However, while operators competed against each other, vying for 3G subscribers, consumer adoption was slow. By the end of 2010, 3G users accounted for 5.5% of total mobile subscribers (Sha, 2011). 2G to 2.75G subscribers still accounted for the majority market. The incompatibility between multiple technologies, high costs, and lack of compelling 3G services led to user reluctance to upgrade (Clendenin, 2010).
Morgan Stanley (2009) states that 3G is key to the success of mobile Internet; while Japan appears to be testimony to this conclusion, China has the highest mobile Internet usage in the world despite low 3G penetration. Different brands using mobile marketing may find their target consumers adopting different mobile technologies. For brands targeting the high-end of the market, new features enabled by 3G, such as rich-media mobile sites, would help reach their target users with high impact. For mass market brands, the focus may still be 2-2.75G mobile elements that would work on older phones such as SMS, MMS and simple WAP sites. 29
Following the launch of 3G, the State Council unveiled its two-stage plan in early 2010 to roll out the convergence of Telecom, Broadcasting and Internet networks, long delayed by the conflicts of interest between MIIT and The State Administration of Radio Film and Television (SARFT). The plan was to run trials during 2010-2012 for mutual entry by telcos and broadcasters, which was expected to expand into full-blown convergence during 2013-2015.
While network convergence may drive the innovation in mobile service and mobile marketing, the process involves different industries and regulatory bodies and would be fraught with tension and entanglement among different parties. It is going to be a long march as MIIT and SAFRT, the regulators of telecom and TV broadcasting industries, negotiate their interests throughout the process. The impact on mobile marketing adoption still waits to be seen in this “complicated and uncertain environment coupled with advances in technology and innovation” (Pattal, Zeng, & Li, 2010).
2.3 Organizational adoption of mobile marketing
2.3.1 Innovation Diffusion Theory
Proposed by Rogers (2003), Innovation Diffusion Theory (IDT) has served as a fundamental theoretical basis for understanding the factors and processes involved in the adoption of innovation in many disciplines beyond its roots in sociology, including communications, marketing, engineering and technology management (Gopalakrishnan & Damanpour, 1994; Tornatzky & Klein, 1982). It is also widely used in mobile service adoption research at both the consumer level (Sawng & Han, 2007) and the organizational level (Mallat & Tuunainen, 2008). According to a recent review of IT innovation adoption studies (Jeyaraj, Rottman, & Lacity, 2006), IDT is one of the seminal theories to examine organizational adoption of IT over the past two decades.
According to Rogers (2003, p. 12), an innovation is defined as “an idea, practice, or object that is perceived as new by an individual or other unit of adoption.” Based on this definition, mobile marketing can be considered as an innovation for an organization, if the organization perceives it as new. Diffusion is “the process by which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system” (Rogers, 2003, pp.5-6). Adoption is a part of diffusion process, which is defined as a decision of “full use of an innovation as the best course of action available”
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(Rogers, 2003, p.177). The adoption decision process is a sequence of stages a potential adopter of an innovation passes through before acceptance of a new product, service or idea. Rogers (2003, p. 19) defined the adoption decision process as “the process through which an individual or other decision-making unit passes from first knowledge of an innovation, to forming an attitude toward the innovation, to a decision to adopt or reject, to implementation of the new idea, and to confirmation of this decision.” The present study focuses on why mobile marketing is adopted by brand owners, in other words, the first three stages.
One of the major contributions of IDT is that Rodgers identified five characteristics of an innovation which affect the rate of diffusion of an innovation. They are relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, observability and trialability. Table 3 presents the definitions of the five characteristics.
TABLE 3 Five Characteristics Affecting Innovation Diffusion based on Rodgers (2003) Relative advantage “the degree to which an innovation is perceived as being better than the idea it supersedes” (Rogers, 2003, p.229) Compatibility “the degree to which an innovation is perceived as consistent with the existing values, past experiences, and needs of potential adopters” (Rogers, 2003, p.240). Complexity “the degree to which an innovation is perceived as relatively difficult to understand and use” (Rogers, 2003, p.257) Observability “the degree to which the results of an innovation are visible to others” (Rogers, 2003, p.258) Trialability “the degree to which an innovation may be experimented with on limited basis” (Rogers, 2003, p.258)
In their meta-analysis of prior innovation adoption research, Tornatzky and Klein (1982) found that compatibility, relative advantage and complexity have the most consistent significant relationship to innovation adoption. While compatibility and relative advantage are positively related to adoption, complexity is negatively related to adoption. These attributes are consistently identified as critical adoption factors in Information Systems research (Jeyaraj, et al., 2006).
In addition to these characteristics, Tornatzky and Klein (1982) identified five other perceived characteristics of IT innovation addressed most frequently in the studies they reviewed: cost, communicability, divisibility, profitability, and social approval. They argued that communicability was closely related to observability, and divisibility to
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trialability. Moore and Benbasat (2001) developed two other characteristics, voluntariness of use and image, but that was addressed at the individual adoption level.
In addition, IDT posits that organizational adoption of innovation is also influenced by internal and external characteristics of the organization. This is supported by the Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) framework by Tornatzky and Fleisher (1990), which is reviewed in the following section.
2.3.2 Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) framework
Tornatzky and Fleischer (1990) provided a broad theoretical framework consisting of the following three contexts that influence the adoption of technological innovations: 1) the technological context, 2) the organizational context, and 3) the environmental context. Technological context describes both the existing technologies in use and new technologies relevant to the firm. Organizational context describes the characteristics of an organization that constrain or facilitate adoption of technological innovations, such as firm size, management support, and the quality of human resources. Environmental context is the arena in which a firm conducts its business--its industry, competitors, regulations, access to resources supplied by others, and governments with which it interacts (Tornatzky & Fleischer, 1990). This framework is consistent with IDT where Rogers (1995: 376-383) emphasized technological characteristics, and both the internal and external characteristics of the organization, as drivers for technology diffusion.
The TOE framework has been applied to study organizational adoption of innovation in the area of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) systems adoption (e.g., Iacovou, Benbasat, & Dexter, 1995), open systems adoption (Chau & Tam, 1997), Internet adoption (Teo, Tan, & Buk, 1997), and e-business diffusion (S. Xu, Zhu, & Gibbs, 2004; K. Zhu, Kraemer, & Xu, 2006; K. Zhu, Kraemer, Xu, & Dedrick, 2004). TOE framework has also been applied to the firm-level adoption of mobile technologies in a variety of business functions such as supply chain (Doolin & Ali, 2008; Y.-M. Wang, Wang, & Yang, 2010) and operation (Banerjee et al., 2007). Table 4 presents the previous studies using TOE framework in investigating the organizational adoption of technological innovations.
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TABLE 4 Previous Studies Using the TOE Framework in Investigation of Organizational Adoption of Technological Innovations
Study Innovation Technological Context Organizational Context Environmental Context (Chau & Tam, Open perceived benefits; complexity of IT infrastructure; market uncertainty 1997) system perceived barriers; satisfaction with existing systems; perceived importance of compliance formalization on system development to standards, interoperability, and and management interconnectivity
(K. Zhu, E-business technology competence firm scope; consumer readiness; Kraemer, & Xu, firm size competitive pressure; 2003) lack of trading partner readiness (K. Zhu, Dong, E-business relative advantage; compatibility; technology competency; competitive intensity; Xu, & Kraemer, costs and security concern organizational size partner readiness 2006) (Gibbs & E-commerce technology resources perceived benefits; external pressure; Kraemer, 2004) lack of organizational compatibility; government promotion; financial resources; firm size legislation barriers (Hong & Zhu, E-commerce technology integration; web spending; partner usage 2006) web functionalities; perceived obstacles EDI use
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TABLE 4 (Cont’d) Previous Studies Using the TOE Framework in Investigation of Organizational Adoption of Technological Innovations Study Innovation Technological Context Organizational Context Environmental Context
(Kuan & Chau, 2001) EDI perceived direct benefits; perceived financial cost; perceived industry pressure; perceived indirect benefits perceived technical perceived government competence pressure
(C. Zhang, Cui, Huang, IT usage IT infrastructure IT management e-government; & Zhang, 2007) government regulation and promotion
(S. Xu, et al., 2004) Internet technology competence firm size; competition intensity; global scope; regulatory environment enterprise integration
(Doolin & Ali, 2008) Mobile in supply chain relative advantage; information intensity competitive intensity; compatibility; leadership partner influence; complexity organizational readiness available support
(Y.-M. Wang, et al., RFID relative advantage; top management support; competitive pressure; 2010) compatibility; firm size; trading partner pressure complexity technology competence; information intensity
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While specific factors vary, the TOE framework has received consistent empirical support. Based on their review and analysis of IT innovation adoption research, Jeyaraj, Rottman, and Lacity (2006) suggested that organizational adoption of IT innovation is influenced by factors related to innovation characteristics, organizational characteristics and environmental characteristics. Therefore it is safe to say that the TOE framework is an appropriate and comprehensive theoretical guide for studying the factors that influence organizational adoption of mobile marketing.
2.3.3 Organizational adoption of mobile marketing
When it comes to the diffusion and success factors of mobile marketing, the research largely centres on SMS, the most widely adopted form. For example, via a quantitative content analysis of the Fortune Global 500 Websites and qualitative interviews with European experts, Scharl et al. (2005) explored the diffusion of SMS marketing and propose a conceptual model of successful SMS advertising. Recognizing the development of mobile marketing, they point out future research should “investigate emerging standards, such as MMS and their impact on planning, executing and evaluating mobile marketing campaigns” (Scharl, et al., 2005: 170).
Okazaki and Taylor (2008) conducted an empirical study on the European market to examine the factors leading to adoption of SMS advertising by multinationals. These include: the ability to build brand image, the ability to use location-based marketing; the perceptions of how well consumers accept SMS advertising, and the perceptions of the technological infrastructure. However, as the research was conducted via telephone interviews with senior managers in marketing based on a structured questionnaire, it limits the managerial responses to the four antecedents of managerial intention to adopt SMS advertising. Semi-structured or in-depth interviews would have disclosed more factors leading to the adoption of SMS advertising by multinationals.
Shankar, Venkatesh, Hofacker, & Naik (2010) examined mobile marketing adoption and success factors in the retail industry and proposed a conceptual framework that comprises three key entities: the consumer, the mobile, and the retailer. This included technological factors, organizational factors and while the consumer was considered to belong to environmental factors, other actors in the environment were left out.
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Most research regarding the adoption of mobile marketing at firm level has centred on technological concerns, user acceptance and potential adopter characteristics. In addition to these considerations, Frambach and Schillewaert (2002) pointed out the need to examine the influence of supplier activities on innovation adoption at an organizational level. Approaching firm adoption of mobile commerce from the perspective of relational view and institutional theory, Swilley (2007) examined factors such as internal and external relationships and perceived benefits and firms’ technological opportunism. Based on a survey among various industries in the United States, the study showed that mimetic pressures from competitors, coercive pressures from top management and the government, and normative pressures from industry associations, major suppliers and customers drive firms to adopt mobile commerce as a viable marketing strategy. While the firms’ internal and external relationships were found to have an impact on their adoption decision in this study, the complexities and dynamics among different actors were not examined.
As mobile marketing is currently in its early stage of development and is constantly evolving, there are many actors involved on the supply side. In their study focusing on the analysis of key success factors of mobile marketing value chain, Facchetti et al. (2005: 66) observed that “very little is said about the concerns regarding the level of integration of the mobile marketing value chain, about the relevance of traditional players in the take off of the market, their action within the value chain as well as the critical success factors (p. 66).” This is also the case in mobile marketing adoption research.
However, a value chain approach is too linear. Research has been conducted to carry the concept of value chain further, to value network, and that has been applied to research on the mobile industry. Based on his study on the mobile phone industry in Japan, Funk (2009) argued that the structure of the mobile phone industry is gradually changing from a value chain to a value network, where firms across industries are interacting to supply mobile Internet–related services, and many of the individual firms, such as operators, phone manufacturers, can be more accurately represented as value networks. Research has also been conducted to identify the actors and their activities in the intentionally developed strategic net of the mobile marketing process (Jari Salo, Sinisalo, & Karjaluoto, 2008; Jari Salo, Sutinen, Tirri, & Karjaluoto, 2005). However, there is still a lack of research on the implications of the industry network for mobile
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marketing adoption at firm level.
As the mobile marketing industry ecosystem is still evolving, with both incumbent and new players in the market, it is important to examine the environmental context and its implications for brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing. In their studies examining the factors leading to the hesitant adoption of mobile advertising, using the lens of political economy, Wilken and Sinclair (2009b) showed concern for a wider range of environmental factors beyond consumers. Based on their analysis of the advertising and related trade press, they examined the inherent conflicts in the complex mobile phone ecosystem and analysed the impact of some technologies, such as 3G and location-based advertising, on the adoption. The actors in the ecosystem they examined included mobile operators, advertising agencies and marketers, content providers, and handset manufacturers. While they examined advertising agencies as a whole, I would suggest that mobile marketing specialist agencies and traditional advertising agencies need to be examined separately as they have different agenda and resources and, therefore, play different roles in the adoption of mobile marketing. Further, while the conflicts in the ecosystem exert an influence on mobile marketing adoption at firm level, the interdependencies among them also need to be examined, which may drive them to negotiate their interests. In addition, other environmental factors such as competitive pressure and consumer readiness also warrant further research.
Previous research on adoption of mobile marketing by firms is summarized in Table 5. The adoption factors examined in these studies are aligned with TOE framework.
To consider the environmental context as well as the technological and organizational context in mobile marketing adoption by brand owners, a unified theoretical framework is required in order to guide the empirical research. The TOE framework can be applied here. In addition, as published articles on new media research in China often lack a theoretical framework or a mechanism to explain the processes of new media diffusion and the consequences of new media use on individuals, organizations and society at large (Wei, 2009), this research takes a step towards filling the literature gap and applies TOE framework to address RQ1: What factors influence the adoption of mobile marketing by firms in China?
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TABLE 5 Previous Research on Adoption of Mobile Marketing by Firms Author(s) Object of Scope of Theoretical Method Technological Organizational Environmental and year analysis analysis foundations context context context Scharl et SMS Fortune technology quantitative device geographic consumer al. marketing Global 500 diffusion; content technology, difference, behavior (2005) diffusion firms, & proposed a analysis, transmission industry sector, and success European conceptual qualitative process, product fit factors experts model of effective interviews media cost SMS advertising Okazaki SMS 53 senior Innovation quantitative branding strategy, / facilitating (2005) advertising executives of Diffusion Theory analysis of location-based condition, adoption MNCs' (Rogers, 1995) telephone services, and regulatory subsidiaries in interviews service costs control, and Spain (identified as cultural barriers managerial factors) Okazaki SMS multinationals technology telephone the ability to build / the perceptions and advertising in European adoption : interviews brand image, the of how well Taylor adoption market Brand-building based on ability to use consumers (2008) effect, structured location-based accept SMS location-based questionnaire marketing; and advertising, marketing, the perceptions privacy/security of the concerns, technological technological infrastructure. conditions
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TABLE 5 (Cont’d) Previous Research on Adoption of Mobile Marketing by Firms Author(s) Object of Scope of Theoretical foundations Method Technological Organizational Environmental and year analysis analysis context context context (Shankar mobile marketing retailing proposed a conceptual conceptual organizational , et al., adoption and industry framework comprising analysis culture; 2010) success factors three key entities: the the lack of consumer, the mobile, mobile lifestyle and the retailer within organizations (Swilley, adoption of firms in U.S. the relational view of quantitative perceived benefits technological mimetic 2007) mobile the firm (Dyer and survey opportunism; pressures; commerce as Singh 1998), coercive pressure coercive pressure; marketing institutional theory of from top normative strategy the firm (Williamson management pressures 1975) (Guo, adoption of consumer side: TPB qualitative and relative advantage; organization size consumer Zhao, mobile marketing (theory of planned quantitative: compatibility; intention; Jin, & platform behaviour) surveys, case costs; competitive Zhang, Merchant side: TOE studies, security concerns pressure; 2010) (technology-organizatio regulatory n-environment support framework, IDT (innovation diffusion theory) (Wilken the factors that Mobile phone political economy of meta-analysis 3G, location-aware / inherent conflicts & contribute to the ecosystem communications of advertising advertising amongst the Sinclair, hesitant adoption and related complex mobile 2009b) of mobile trade press phone ecosystem advertising 39
Drawing upon Tornatzky and Fleischer’s framework and the mobile marketing literature, a preliminary list of factors influencing adoption of mobile marketing by firms is developed as follows (See Table 6). This was used as a guide in Study One in the interview as well as the analysis of the interview data. TABLE 6 Proposed Framework of Factors Influencing Adoption of Mobile Marketing by Firms Context Factors relative advantage (Rogers, 2003) perceived barriers (Chau & Tam, 1997) Technological observability (Rogers, 2003) Context complexity (Rogers, 2003 compatibility with existing technologies and practice (Rogers, 2003) innovation orientation (Tornatzky & Fleischer, 1990) top management support (Y.-M. Wang, et al., 2010) organizational readiness (Doolin & Ali, 2008) - Financial resources (Gibbs & Kraemer, 2004); Organizational - perceived financial cost (Kuan & Chau, 2001) Context target market fit firm size (K. Zhu, et al., 2003), (K. Zhu, Dong, et al., 2006); (Gibbs & Kraemer, 2004) (S. Xu, et al., 2004) (Y.-M. Wang, et al., 2010) competitive pressure (Y.-M. Wang, et al., 2010; K. Zhu, et al., 2003); competitive intensity (Doolin & Ali, 2008; K. Zhu, Dong, et al., 2006), competition intensity (S. Xu, et al., 2004) customer readiness (K. Zhu, et al., 2003) market supply Environmental trading partner readiness (K. Zhu, Dong, et al., 2006; K. Context Zhu, et al., 2003); available support (Doolin & Ali, 2008) trading partner pressure(Y.-M. Wang, et al., 2010) regulatory environment government promotion, legislation barriers(Gibbs & Kraemer, 2004); perceived government pressure (Kuan & Chau, 2001)
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2.4 Mobile media in consumer empowerment and co-creation experience
2.4.1 Mobile media and consumers co-creators
As the marketing discipline has undergone a paradigm shift toward a new Service-Dominant Logic (Vargo & Lusch, 2004), the old mentality of “producers produce and communicate, while consumers receive and consume” (Varey, 2002: 20) has lost its validity. Consumers are increasingly acknowledged in theory and practice as creative agents participating in the co-production of value (Firat & Venkatesh, 1995; A. Venkatesh, 1999). The conception of value and the value creation process is rapidly evolving from firm-centric, product-and-service focused perspectives to a paradigm of value co-creation through personalized consumer experiences between firms, consumers and consumer communities (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2003; 2004). Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2003) argued that the locus of innovation must shift from products and services to co-creation experiences.
In the new media environment, a growing body of literature is focusing on consumer co-creation in product and service development such as online gaming, social networking sites and open-source software development (Howe, 2008; Leadbeater, 2008; C. Li & Bernoff, 2008; Tapscott, 2008; Tapscott & Williams, 2007). As Leadbeater (2008) argued, a new economy has arrived where people want not services and goods delivered to them, but tools so they can take part. Consumers with increasing access to digital and network technologies and online distribution channels are getting involved in more and more processes of businesses from product development to marketing. From consumer-made advertising to consumer-designed products, companies are tapping into the “the wisdom of crowds” (Surowiecki, 2005), and networked consumers with creative urges are becoming an important part of open innovation (Chesbrough, 2006).
User generated content is an important part of value co-creation. As Lévy (1997) argued, “The distinctions between authors and readers, producers and spectators,
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creators and interpretations will blend to form a reading-writing continuum, which will extend from the machine and network designers to the ultimate recipient, each helping to sustain the activities of the others” (p.28). As summarized by Spurgeon (2007), new media consumers have been variously theorized as the citizen consumers (Hartley, 2005) of participatory DIY media cultures (Jenkins, 2006a); as the “prosumers” (Toffler, 1970) of participatory fan cultures (Jenkins, 2006a; Marshall, 2004); as “viewsers” (O'Regan & Goldsmith, 2002: 103), “co-creators” (Banks, 2002), and “productive players” (Humphreys, 2005) of computer games; and as the “produsers” of networked social software such as blogs (Bruns & Jacobs, 2006). In the case of mobile communications, it allows an efficient integration of the individual customer as a co-producer in the process of content and service production owing to the inherently personal nature of the mobile phone (von Hippel & Katz, 2002).
Further, consumers are empowered, as they are increasingly connected with each other. As the mobile phone lowers the threshold for interaction and tightens the social network (Rich Ling, 2004), it proves to be an increasingly important communication channel in facilitating social connections. Kelly (2005) underlined the role of mobile content and services as “social currency”, especially in youth culture. The social use of mobile communications plays a dominant role in the process of value creation in mobile media markets (Feldmann, 2005: 183).
Together with the rise of user-generated content are the various communities, the majority of which have coincided with consumer groups or entertainment platforms in the form of “taste community” or “brand community”(van Dijck, 2009). The rise of user-generated content has also rendered the notion of “mass market” outdated and given rise to the “long tail” market (Anderson, 2006). This is evidenced by a wealth of mobile content and services, such as the mobile novel, mobile music, mobile games, and mobile social networking. In addition to user-generated content, users also share branded or sponsored mobile content to construct a self-narrative, e.g. via sponsored mobile animated greetings (Feldmann, 2005). Prior research indicates that a substantial
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number of people are utilizing the opportunity to forward advertising messages received (Trappey & Woodside, 2005).
This increasing consumer empowerment has led to a shift in the balance of power in marketplace meaning-making from marketer to consumer (Deighton & Kornfeld, 2009). Brand owners face a new landscape of consumer relationships in the new media environment, where “the boundaries between commerce, content and information are being redrawn” (van Dijck, 2009). With the rise of mobile media at a time when consumers are increasingly become co-producers (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2005), the question becomes how to leverage the mobile media to engage consumers in content co-creation, and how to provide an engaging content consumption experience in the case of corporate-generated content.
2.4.2 Mobile media, place, and hybrid space
In addition to empowering consumers in content and service co-creation, both as individuals and as networked communities, mobile media has changed the environment in which co-creation activities take place. While, like the Internet, the mobile media allows consumers to generate content and connect with each other in virtual space, the ubiquity and location-awareness of the mobile media means people are in “perpetual contact” wherever they go in the physical world (J. E. Katz & Aakhus, 2002). For Townsend (2001, p. 70), individuals live in this “phonespace” because the mobile has become their “new umbilical cord”, their primary link to the temporally, spatially fragmented network of friends and colleagues they have constructed for themselves. This makes location an important dimension in content generation and their interaction with other people. Arguments about the diminishing importance of space in mobile communications (Licoppe, 2004) have largely been superseded by acceptance that they add new dimensions to everyday life.
While mobile technology is location-independent, it is the mobile phone’s mobility that, paradoxically, makes place even more important (Ito, 2002). Place can be
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understood not merely as a point in space in terms of physical geography, but in terms of social and cultural practices of storytelling and meaning-making that circulate around a physical locale (Harvey, 2001; , p. 387; Massey, 1999; Soja, 1989). Mobile technologies have a significant role in asserting the importance of place as both a geo-imaginary and socio-cultural precept (Hjorth, 2008). The ubiquity, location-awareness, and multi-functionality of the mobile phone offer possibilities for reshaping the experience and understanding of locales.
Crawford and Goggin (2009) used the term “geomobile web” to refer to the crossover between the place-making and space-constructing technologies associated with mobile technologies, including GPS, navigational devices, or Bluetooth and advertising, and the practices of online mapping and geotagging enabled by the “geospatial web”. They argue that the geomobile web is about new inventions of place in everyday life. User-generated geomobile content promises to transform the experience of navigating familiar and unfamiliar spaces on foot (Crawford & Goggin, 2009). Locally produced and locally relevant content on new and mobile media were found to play an important role in engaging people, for example, in urban cultural community development (Klaebe & Foth, 2007). Yet, new mobile media reinventions of place are still at an early stage and have not been widely discussed (Crawford & Goggin, 2009).
The impact of mobile media on the interconnection between physical and digital spaces has also attracted increasing research interest. In their review of the existing literature on “augmented reality”, Milgram and Colquhoun (1999) found that the term was defined in three ways, based on the technologies used. While augmented reality refers to cases where the real environment is augmented by means of virtual objects, they proposed the term “mixed reality” to refer to the trend of any mixture of real and virtual environments (Milgram & Colquhoun, 1999). However, they restricted their definition to graphic imaging, and their concepts were technologically oriented without considering social and communication dimensions.
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Ishii (1999) approached the concept of mixed reality with a foresight that desktop computing can “bridge the gap between cyberspace and physical environment by making digital information (bits) tangible”(p. 233) through wearable computing and ubiquitous computing. He took Milgram and Colquhoun’s (1999) concept one step further by emphasizing the importance of the interface through which people connect to digital space and its role in changing people’s perceptions of both physical and digital spaces. He also emphasized the relevance of mobility in blurring the borders between physical and digital spaces. However, Ishii shared Milgram and Colquhoun’s (1999) neglect of social and communication dimensions.
Manovich (2006) stated that research agendas, media attention, and practical applications in the 21st century have to focus on the physical, instead of the virtual in the 1990s. Manovich used the term “augmented space”, which he derived from “augmented reality”, to describe cases where physical space is overlaid with dynamically changing information, often in multimedia form and localized for users. Such technological applications dynamically deliver data to, or extract data from physical space. Examples of the former include cellspace technologies, which send data to mobile users in physical space, and computer displays in public places presenting digital information to passers-by. Examples of the latter include video surveillance. Therefore, the information flows into and out of physical space, blurring the line between the physical and the virtual. In his discussion, Manovich (2006) reconceptualised augmentation as a cultural and aesthetic practice rather than as a technology. However, communication and social interaction were still not considered.
The more recent literature has come to examine these dimensions. As it is widely acknowledged that “virtual” and “physical” spaces are no longer two separate dimensions and have come to define each other, new media has the potential to contribute to augmenting communities (Aurigi & De Cindio, 2008). As Aurigi (2008, p. 348) noted: “Augmented place making stems from both understanding and practicing the articulation of physical and digital together as one space, as well as from the augmentation of community – and hopefully by community”.
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In a similar vein, Jensen (2010) used the examples of Google Earth to illustrate that the Internet is not a space radically distinct from the space of the “real world”. Through constant dynamics between the physical, mediated and imaginary experiences, it facilitates an enhanced spatial and social experience, a spatial augmentation.
de Souza e Silva (2006) coined the term “hybrid space”, which she defined as “conceptual space created by the merging of borders between physical and digital spaces, because of the use of mobile technologies as social devices” (p. 265). She approached the concept via three interconnected spatial analyses: connected spaces, mobile spaces, and social spaces. While some studies suggested that mobile phones withdraw users from physical space (Gergen, 2002; Puro, 2002), de Souza e Silva argued that mobile phones strengthen users’ connections to physical space by enfolding remote contexts inside the present context, and promote sociability and communication in urban spaces.
Kabisch also argued, locative media allows “the scope of the network to be expanded to include physical mobility, and ushered a welcome shift of discourse from virtuality to hybridity” (2010, p. 52). By examining social and communication practices with “locative media” projects in electronic urban annotations, mapping and geo-localization, location-based mobile games, and flash and smart mobs, Lemos (2010) also pointed out that mobile technologies, under the label of locative media, and bottom-up process reinforce the hybridization of physical space and cyberspace, bringing new senses of place and communities.
In China, the high penetration of mobile phones affects the way people use and understand urban space (Dan, Doulet, & Keane, 2009). Increased mobility challenges traditional forms of sociability, especially those related to the notion of proximity (Davis, 1995). Dan, Doulet and Keane (2009) also pointed out that while traditional pattern of Chinese sociability relied on kinship and spatial relationships that are locally embedded in specific social structures, today’s sociability revolves around larger self-designed “small worlds” based on common interests. Being mobile in the opening social circle introduces a transition “from collective sociality to collaborative spatiality”
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(Dan, et al., 2009, p. 386). This shows community-building processes are undergoing rapid changes, marketers face a new landscape to reach their target consumers and connect online and offline brand experiences for them. As the communities expand from kinship and geography-based networks to the online world without geographical boundaries, they may extend back into the real world, where mobile media can facilitate locally relevant experience.
It has been suggested that the combination of virtual and physical environments, might offer even greater rewards to both the consumer and the marketer (Gilmore & Pine, 2002; Koontz & Gibson, 2002). Currently, the prospect of location-aware marketing to connect marketers and individual consumers at the point of purchase also have marketers excited, but they are hesitant about adoption owing to the risk of overuse and spam (Wilken & Sinclair, 2009b). In addition, although place is regarded as an important concept for mobile marketers, the complexity of socio-spatial interactions and place-based uses of mobile media still escapes much attention by marketers (Wilken & Sinclair, 2009b). It remains a question for marketers as to how to make use of place-making and space-constructing mobile media to provide a co-creation experience for consumers without the risk of overuse and spam.
2.4.3 Mobile media as text, things, platforms
As Lash and Lury (2007) observed, “Media have come to act less as texts and more as things, as platforms or environments” (p.29). They argued: (C)orresponding to the shift from texts to objects is a shift in how we encounter culture: from reading and interpretation to perception, experience and operationality. As a consequence (media studies) are concerned less w ith symbolic communication as such than with agency, affect, effect and transformation. (p.29)
As a wealth of mobile content and services such as mobile novel, mobile video, and mobile games become available and increasingly popular, marketers have started to leverage these as narrative forms to communicate with their target consumers. In addition, according to Ruston (2008), the mobile phone is well suited as a platform for
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immersive and interactive narrative entertainment. He argued that the narrative potential of mobile media lies in capitalizing on the interactive qualities and history of telephony, the networked architecture of mobile communications, and the ubiquity of the mobile device which bridges the real and the imaginative, the physical and the virtual (Ruston, 2008). Acting as the interface that operates in the real world and virtual world, the mobile capitalizes on the most immersive environment available (the real world), and manages the tension between interactivity and immersion. This echoed Lash and Lury (2007) in that the mobile was approached as a tool in narrative, and a platform for new forms of narrative, which offers opportunities for participation and interaction.
Therefore, I approach mobile media in this thesis as texts, things, or platforms for meaning and value co-creation. The centrality of the mobile media as texts, things, platforms will be examined in Study Two, specifically, the case studies from Chapter 5 to Chapter 9.
2.4.4. A proposed model of mobile-mediated co-creation brand experience
The literature review above demonstrates that mobile media has witnessed the growth of user-generated content, increasingly networked users without limit to time and space, and the merging of physical and digital space where hybrid space arises. It can act as texts, things, as platforms or environments to facilitate the brand experience. By leveraging mobile media in marketing campaigns, marketers face new opportunities for offering a co-creation brand experience. Mobile media influences the process of content co-creation and the co-creation environment, and the centrality of mobile media in marketing campaigns varies.
This thesis considers the role of mobile media in co-creation brand experiences along three dimensions: content generation and consumption, centrality of mobile media, and environment. More specifically, as shown in Figure 1, along the axis of content generation, corporate generated content (CGC) stands at one end and user
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generated content (UGC) stands at the other. Along the axis of environment, mobile media can facilitate brand experience in virtual space or hybrid space. While it is recognized that the real and the virtual are always intermingled, such as a user reading a novel on the mobile phone being physically located in the real world, this thesis makes a distinction between virtual space and hybrid space for ease of discussion. It adopts the concept of hybrid space proposed by de Souza e Silva (2006), where the mobile is used as a social device, as an interface between the real and the virtual world, especially those involving place-making and space-constructing experiences. Other brand experience facilitated by the mobile, that have little place-making and space-constructing experience, is, in this thesis, considered to be in the virtual space. Along the axis of the centrality of mobile media, mobile media assumes a supplementary or central role in the whole marketing campaign as text, things, or platforms. Case studies are presented from Chapter 5 to 9, which examine the role of mobile media in facilitating brand experience co-creation to cater to the Chinese consumers’ dual desires for individuality and social interaction.
Content Environment UGC
Hybrid space
Centrality of mobile media Supplementary Central
Virtual space CGC
FIGURE 1 Model of mobile-mediated co-creation brand experiences.
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2.5 Conclusion
This chapter started with an overview of mobile marketing and mobile marketing in China as the contextual background. Then it introduced innovation diffusion theory, TOE framework, and their application in the adoption of innovation by firms. The review of previous research on organizational adoption of mobile marketing revealed that most research has centred on technological concerns, user acceptance and potential adopter characteristics. In addition, the complexities of the value network of the mobile marketing industry and its role on firms’ mobile marketing adoption needs further research.
Guided by the TOE framework, which has received consistent empirical support in organizational adoption of IT innovations, and based on mobile marketing literature, this chapter proposed a model for a preliminary list of factors influencing firms’ adoption of mobile marketing. This served as a guide to the semi-structured interviews in Study One.
This chapter also reviewed the literature on consumer empowerment, value co-creation, and the impact of mobile media in these fields. Existing research shows that mobile media furthers the role of consumers as co-creators owing to its ubiquity, multi-functionality, personal nature, and constant connection without space or time limit. In addition, mobile media, as locative media, makes place more important, and enables new inventions of place and brings a new sense to communities. Mobile media, used as social devices, also merge the borders of physical and digital spaces, where a hybrid space emerges. While it is suggested that the merging of virtual and physical environments might offer even greater rewards to both the consumer and the marketer (Gilmore & Pine, 2002; Koontz & Gibson, 2002), it remains a question as to how to make use of place-making and space-constructing mobile media to provide a co-creation experience for consumers without risking issues of overuse and spam. In addition, media have come to act less as texts and more as things, as platforms or environments (Lash & Lury, 2007). This chapter has proposed a model of
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mobile-mediated brand experience of co-creation along the dimensions of content generation and consumption, the centrality of mobile media and its environment. This will guide the case studies in Study Two.
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Chapter 3 Methodology and Research Design
The research focus in this thesis is the investigation of consumer brands’ adoption and use of mobile media to build consumer relationships through co-creation brand experiences. As stated in Chapter 1, the program of research includes two studies to address sub-research questions. Based on the literature review in Chapter 2, the model of factors leading to the adoption of mobile marketing by consumer brands in China is proposed to guide Study One; the model of mobile-mediated co-creation brand experiences is developed to guide Study Two along three dimensions: content generation, centrality of mobile media, and interactive environment.
The purpose of Chapter 3 is to explain how the studies in this program of research were designed and implemented. The chapter is structured as follows: Section 3.1 addresses the philosophical approach of this research; Section 3.2 discusses Study One’s research method and design; Section 3.3 discusses Study Two’s research method and design; ethical consideration is presented in Section 3.4. Section 3.5 presents the conclusions of this chapter.
3.1 Philosophical approach
This research was conducted within a post-positivist paradigm as it accepts that “the social world is reproduced and transformed in daily life” (Bhaskar, 1989, p. 4) and reality is only imperfectly captured and understood (Lincoln & Guba, 2000). This research is based on two assumptions: first, that structures are always enabling as well as constraining (Giddens, 1984: 25); second, that “the relations between situated actions and general formations, local choices and prevailing circumstances are dynamic and two-way” (Deacon, Pickering, Golding, & Murdock, 2007: 9); that “structures are constituted through action” at the same time as “action is constituted structurally” (Giddens, 1976: 161). Therefore, to understand everyday action, it is necessary to take account of the broader social and cultural formations by providing “the means, media, rules and resources for everything we do” (Bhaskar, 1989, p. 4).
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This research aims to understand the mechanism underlying consumer brands’ adoption and use of mobile media in marketing, in the context of China’s leap into marketing and mobile media, and its consumer revolution and participatory culture. This agenda requires an interdisciplinary approach in order to generate knowledge; specifically, drawing on the insights from marketing, consumer culture, and media studies. Mixed methods are also critical for addressing the research questions, which are explained in the following sections.
3.2 Research method and design for Study One
The objectives of Study One are 1) to develop a model of technological, organizational, and environmental factors which influence consumer brand’s adoption of mobile marketing in China; 2) to identify the opportunities and challenges in brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing in China. It aims to answer RQ1: What factors influence the adoption of mobile marketing by firms in China?
3.2.1 Rationale for choosing semi-structured interview method
Since the use of mobile media in brand consumer relationship is still a relatively new notion, interviewing is a suitable means of exploring new topics (Kvale, 1996). In addition, as an uncertain and complicated innovation, mobile marketing is located in a complex ecosystem at its current stage (Feldmann, 2005), which has been transformed from a linear to a more networked model, where convergence has blurred traditional industry boundaries and simple co-operation or competition has turned into complex co-opetition (Hearn & Pace, 2006). In this case, the factors facilitating and inhibiting brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing can be better understood by examining interpretations of relevant members of the mobile marketing community in China (Van de Ven & Rogers, 1988). Interviews provide rich insights for exploring, identifying, and understanding viewpoints, attitudes, and influences (Healy & Perry, 2000). Moreover, semi-structured interviews allow greater control over the interview situation, such as sequencing of questions while providing opportunities for making clarifications and collecting supplementary information (Frankfort-Nachmias & Nachmias, 1996). Finally,
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as mobile marketing is still in its infancy in China, it was expected that the reliability of quantitative results would be adversely affected by low statistical power effects (Baroudi & Orlikowski, 1989).
3.2.2 Sampling
The sample for Study One was selected using purposeful sampling (Coyne, 1997). Purposeful sampling involves selecting information-rich individuals (as individuals are the unit of analysis in this research) to interview in-depth (Coyne, 1997). In this research, interviewees were selected from key informants in the mobile marketing industry in China to obtain different perspectives on the topic. As brands are just one actor in the network of players with complex interdependencies, competition and cooperation (Feldmann, 2005), it is important to understand the whole scenario and the role of other actors in brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing. To guarantee a sufficient level of expertise in our sample, senior level interviewees were selected. A list of interviewees and their background is listed in Table 7.
Interviews were conducted until theoretical saturation was reached and information redundancy occurred (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000; Anselm Strauss & Juliet Corbin, 1998). Previous research suggests that theoretical saturation occurs after interviewing around 20 research participants (Sandberg, 2000). In this study, 27 interviews were conducted.
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TABLE 7 List of Interviewees Category No. Organization Name Position Mobile MA1 Velti Alvin Foo VP of Sales, Asia Pacific Marketing MA2 CASEE Xin Ye CEO Specialist MA3 Madhouse Joshua Maa Founder & CEO Agencies MA4 UUCUN Zhang Zhen CEO / Solution Dong Providers MA5 MMX China Brian Zhai GM (MA) MA6 Fractalist Ella Yang Sales Director, Shanghai Traditional TA1 Carat Hristo Cui Associate VP, Digital, Agency Key Account (TA) TA2 Ogilvy & Mather Michelle Chen Planning Director, OgilvyOne Shanghai TA3 Ogilvy & Mather Kunal Sinha Executive Director, Discovery, Greater China TA4 Wwwins Alvin Huang Managing Director TA5 Wwwins Lisa Huang Associate Media Director TA6 Mojo Interactive David Williams Chief Magic Creator Space Content CP/SP1 Kong.net Yu Zhe VP /Service CP/SP2 3g.cn Wang Lei GM, Beijing Providers CP/SP3 tx.com.cn Wang Pengfei Co-founder, COO (CP/SP) CP/SP4 tx.com.cn Stone Chen Marketing Director CP/SP5 Tudou Anita Huang VP, Marketing & Business Development CP/SP6 30miao.com Stan Chu Founder & CEO CP/SP7 fugu mobile Ranjit Singh CEO, MoMo Shanghai Brand Owner BO1 Nokia Joseph Zheng Head of Corporate New (BO) Business Development, China BO2 Nokia Tony Zhang Senior Manager, Corporate Business Development, China BO3 Vancl Li Jianxiong Head of Brand Management BO4 Intercontinental Lee Ching Siew Director of Finance and Hangzhou Business Support Venture Capital VC1 BlueRun Mike Ding Investment Director, (VC) Ventures China VC2 Steamboat Simon Wang Senior Associate Ventures Independent IC1 Mobinode, Lu Gang Founder & CEO Consultant MobiTV (IC) IC2 X Media Lab Brendan Harkin Founder & director
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3.2.3 Data collection procedures
The fieldwork took place from September 2009 to March 2010 in Shanghai, one of the most vibrant mobile media markets in China in terms of mobile content/service consumption and the number of service providers (J. Li, 2008). The informant-rich city facilitated data collection. In Study One, personal networks and the snowball sampling technique were used to identify interviewees with adequate knowledge and experience in the research area (Hastings & Perry, 2000; Patton, 1990). All interviewees were considered experts, within their organizations, on the mobile marketing topics that were of interest in this study.
Potential interviewees were approached via email first, where I explained my request to solicit their view on the topic, the nature of the research and the interview, together with an attached document summarizing the study objectives and the open-ended questions, provided in the form of a topic list. They were also informed about the approximate time required for the interview, and were assured that participation was totally voluntary, and that uncomfortable questions did not need to be answered. Providing interviewees with this information in advance was important as it was expected to allow them maximum freedom in expressing their viewpoints while also giving them time to prepare for the interview (Flick, 2002). When they agreed to be interviewed, semi-structured face-to-face interviews were arranged in case the interviewee was in Shanghai. In other cases, telephone interviews were conducted. An appointment at a convenient time and location for the participant was made and confirmed via email. In this study, 22 interviews were conducted fact-to-face; either at the interviewee’s office or at a coffee shop close to their place of work, and the rest were conducted over the telephone.
Before the interview, participants were briefed as to research protocols and procedures. Two copies of the letter of information and the consent form were handed to the interviewee for the interviewee to read and sign. In the cases of telephone interviews, the interviewees sent the scanned document with their signatures from their
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professional email addresses. A copy of the signed letter was kept by the researcher as a form of consent, and the informant kept the other copy. Following the briefing, interviewees were asked questions following themes designed in the interview protocol. The researcher, a bilingual Chinese native with a professional qualification in Chinese-to-English and English-to-Chinese translation, translated the pre-interview documentation. All the interviews followed the same protocols to ensure that all relevant areas of interest were consistently addressed. However, the interviewer deviated from this list depending on the expertise of the interviewees.
The interview consisted of the following themes: - What opportunities genuinely exist in the Chinese market? - What challenges confront industry growth in China? - What are industry players’ roles in the current market and how do they relate to each other? - What technological factors facilitate brand owners’ mobile marketing adoption? - What organizational factors facilitate brand owners’ mobile marketing adoption? - What environmental factors facilitate brand owners’ mobile marketing adoption? - What technological factors inhibit brand owners’ mobile marketing adoption? - What organizational factors inhibit brand owners’ mobile marketing adoption? - What environmental factors inhibit brand owners’ mobile marketing adoption?
The interviewer also used more probing questions during the interview to elicit further explanation, or clarification, where appropriate. Interviews were conducted in Mandarin Chinese or English, whichever was the interviewees’ native language. Interviews with TA2, TA3, TA6, CP/SP7, BO4, IC2 were conducted in English, and the rest were conducted in Mandarin Chinese. Interviews were recorded with the interviewee’s permission. While the informants were not obliged to respond to every question, they were actively engaged in the interview in all cases. Interview durations ranged from 35 minutes to 95 minutes. In all, 33.5 hours of interviews were recorded.
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3.2.4 Data analysis
Interviews were transcribed, and those conducted in Mandarin Chinese were translated into English by the researcher. The contents of the interview transcripts were analysed thematically. Codes were developed to help identify and analyse emerging patterns of themes (Carson, Gilmore, Gronhaug, & Perry, 2001; Patton, 1990). Within thematic coding, both open coding and selective coding were used to identify the dimensions in the data and then to integrate and refine the theory (Flick, 2002; A. Strauss & J. Corbin, 1998). Codes were developed both deductively from literature and inductively from interview data.
While interviews were the primary source of information, the interviewer also identified and examined secondary data, such as documents on websites of interviewees’ organizations, industry publications, and press releases. A review of the mobile market in China was presented in Chapter 1 and 2. Most interviewees also identified additional supporting secondary data. The secondary data were used for verifying and triangulating the findings of the interviews. Second, as shown in Table 7, the interviewees belonged to different sectors in the mobile marketing industry, and therefore provided different perspectives. Juxtaposing different perspectives is central to the idea of triangulation (Frankfort-Nachmias & Nachmias, 1996; Yin, 2009). Finally, the chain of evidence tracing the conclusions to the interview summary and the interview transcripts was also maintained. By doing so, according to Yin (2009), it enhanced the construct validity and the reliability of the research.
Regarding external validity, i.e. generalization of the results, as stated by Lee and Baskerville (2003: 240), “a theory may never be scientifically generalized to a setting where it has not yet been empirically tested and confirmed.” Therefore, as this study was conducted in the Chinese market, the results cannot be directly applied to other countries. While the context of this research places boundaries on the conclusions and implications that can be drawn from the study, the reliability and validity of the findings should not be endangered. Further studies are needed to investigate the adoption of
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mobile marketing media by firms in other countries. This might generate valuable insights into why firms internationally adopt mobile media in their marketing practice.
3.3 Research method and design for Study Two
Study Two involves case studies on consumer brands’ adoption and implementation of mobile media in marketing. The objectives of Study Two are: 1) to investigate the specific role of mobile media in the marketing campaigns in terms of facilitating co-creation brand experiences to cater to the Chinese consumers’ dual desires for individuality and social interaction; 2) to examine the impact of relevant mobile marketing strategies; 3) to examine the factors leading to mobile marketing adoption in each case and to test the findings derived from Study One. It aims to answer RQ2: How and to what effect do firms use mobile media in marketing campaigns to facilitate co-creation brand experiences to cater to Chinese consumers’ desires for individuality and social interaction?
3.3.1 Rationale for choosing case studies method
In general, case studies are the preferred method when (a) “how” or “why” questions are being posed, (b) the investigator has little control over events, and (c) the focus is on contemporary phenomenon within a real-life context (Yin, 2009: 2). The complexity with respect to the number of factors and their interrelationship suggest case study as the best alternative for achieving an in-depth understanding (Stake, 2000). The end result of a sound case study is the acquisition of some insight. Even though case study as a research method confronts scepticism, it has been widely adopted in various disciplines of social sciences (Gerring, 2007).
Case study research can include both single and multiple case studies for exploratory or explanatory purposes (Yin, 2009). Multiple cases are suitable when ‘the intent of the research is description, theory building, or theory testing’ (Eisenhardt, 1989). Eisenhardt (1989) suggested that when the goal is building theory, a design should incorporate between four and ten case studies. To address RQ2, Study Two
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employs a multiple case study method with an objective of developing the theory of adopting mobile media in marketing to build consumer brand relationships through co-creation experiences and testing the result of Study One. While each case remained a single case study, each case’s conclusion was used as information contributing to the whole study by examining similarities and differences in mobile marketing adoption and implementation.
Stake (2000) identified three types of case study: intrinsic, instrumental and collective. Study Two of this research consisted of elements of the three types. First, the case studies were developed because the particular cases were of interest to the researcher and pertinent to the aim of the research. Secondly, this research design also followed the instrumental approach, where a particular case was chosen to obtain an insight into something else, of a more general phenomenon. Specifically, the cases in this study were chosen so as to provide insights into the role of mobile media in facilitating co-creation brand experiences to build consumer-brand relationships in China. Finally, the research design consisted of elements of the collective case study model, whereby a number of cases were examined to establish a better understanding, or to theorize about a larger collection of cases. The cases in this research were selected, as a collective, to generate findings that address the research questions.
3.3.2 The role of theory in case studies
For case studies, “theory development as part of the design phase is essential, whether the ensuing case study’s purpose is to develop or test theory”(Yin, 2009, p. 35). Miles and Huberman shared this view when discussing qualitative studies:
Something is known conceptually about the phenomenon, but not enough to house a theory…At the outset then, we usually have at least a rudimentary conceptual framework, a set of general research questions, some notions about sampling, and some initial data-gathering devices. (1994, p. 17)
Eisenhardt (1989, p. 536) also supported the idea of having a model by suggesting that “a priori specification of constructs” aid the initial design stage of theory building.
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A conceptual framework is valuable because it: “… permits researchers to measure constructs more accurately. If these constructs prove important as the study progresses, researchers have a firmer empirical grounding for the emergent theory” (Eisenhardt, 1989, p. 536).
Divergent opinions exist regarding the use of conceptual theory with respect to the use of propositions and the openness of the model. Yin (2009) encouraged constructing general propositions to guide data collection and analysis. By contrast, Eisenhardt (1989) suggested that when theory building is the goal, the researcher should endeavour to not think about constructing relationships as a way of remaining open to new possibilities.
In this study, the model identifies specific constructs and focuses on the role of mobile media in co-creation brand experiences along three dimensions: content generation and consumption, centrality of mobile media and environment (See Figure 1). Meanwhile the study remained open to new possibilities by asking exploratory questions such as “what is going on?” and “how is it happening?”. In doing so, the model guided data collection and analysis while remaining open to new possibilities.
In addition to answering research question two, this study also attempted to test the theoretical model developed in Study One and to examine the factors leading to mobile marketing adoption in each case.
3.3.3 Case selection
The design of this study was based on multiple cases, each having multiple units of analysis. The main unit of analysis for each case was defined as the marketing campaign, and the embedded units included the company, the marketing objectives; the role of mobile media in content generation and consumption; the centrality of mobile media; and the environment of the campaign; the results of the campaigns; and the influential factors of mobile marketing adoption. In case studies working on small samples, the objective is to select informative and typical cases rather than trying to have a statistical
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representation of the total population (Silverman, 2005; Stake, 2000). In this spirit, this study chose case campaigns based on theoretical sampling to represent the research problem. Specifically, case campaigns were selected from those which have integrated mobile marketing into the whole marketing campaigns to provide interactive and co-creation brand experiences to provide rich data for further analysis.
Based on the discussions in previous chapters, selection criteria were developed in order to determine which marketing campaigns to include in this study. The criteria took into account factors relating to the research questions and practical considerations.
First of all, campaigns were selected from those that targeted the youth segment. Statistics show that the most active mobile users in China are aged 18-35 year old (CNNIC, 2009b). These mobile savvy youth allow brand owners to adopt mobile media in their marketing campaigns to provide them with interactive brand experiences that speak to their mobile culture. It also provides opportunities to examine how brand owners cater to the duality of individualistic and collective cultures among young people by incorporating mobile media in their marketing campaigns.
Second, three dimensions of the co-creation brand experiences were considered, including content generation and consumption, the centrality of the mobile media, and environment. More specifically, the mobile media in the marketing campaign facilitated the co-creation experiences by enabling user co-creation of content or facilitating interactive consumption of corporate generated content; by taking a central or supplementary role as text, tools or platforms in the campaign; by acting as an interface of hybrid space, or facilitating brand experiences in virtual space.
The process for selecting the cases began by identifying potential cases from a variety of sources such as the media, search engines, industry publications, and industry contacts. Based on the above criteria, five cases of mobile marketing campaigns conducted in China were selected to examine their mobile marketing strategies and practices to facilitate co-creation brand experiences in building consumer brand relationships. Each case sits in a different quadrant of the matrix, as in Figure 2, which
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was constructed based on the proposed model of mobile-mediated co-creation brand experiences (See Figure 1) in Chapter 2.
Environment Virtual Space Hybrid Space Centrality of mobile media Supplementary role Central role Content CGC Supplementary content Central narrative device & delivery/customization tool tool in content (individual consumption experience) Nokia E63 Campaign 1 Nokia Supernova Campaign 2
UGC Supplementary tool & Central tool & platform in platform for content location-based experience (communal presumption experience) Clean & Clear Clear Fairness TNF Virtual Red Flag Campaign 3 Nokia Fusion Challenge 4 FIGURE 2 Matrix of mobile-mediated co-creation brand experiences.
All the brand owners of the selected marketing campaigns leveraged mobile media to provide a co-creation brand experience for their target consumers in different ways. The mobile media assumed a more important role in some campaigns than others. Different strategies of using mobile media as text, tools, or platforms in terms of content co-creation and consumption, and co-creation environment to provide individual or communal brand experience, served as the empirical basis for analysis in later chapters.
3.3.4 Data collection
Case studies can employ both qualitative and quantitative evidence. To obtain the rich data of a phenomenon, case study researchers usually prefer qualitative evidence. Case studies rely on multiple techniques as sources of evidence, such as archival records, historical analysis, direct observation, interviews, or a combination of them, to explain, describe, illustrate and explore situations (Stake, 2000). Researchers usually gather data on different aspects of the cases, for example, the nature and background of the case,
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the context of case, other cases, and also of relevant informants (Stake, 2000).
For this study, data were collected from a range of sources through different methods to allow triangulation (Eisenhardt, 1989; Stake, 2000; Yin, 2009). These included documentary analysis of secondary sources, such as company documents, annual reports, press releases, campaign websites, WAP sites, videos of the campaigns, where available; as well as interviews with key informants. These data collection techniques produced rich information and descriptions of the cases, their background and context, and informants through whom the case can be known (Stake, 2000).
The fieldwork proceeded from September 2009 to March 2010. First, secondary data were collected regarding the background of the company, the brands, and the case campaigns. These included company documents, press articles, industry reports, web pages of campaign websites and WAP sites, and, where available, publicly available campaign videos from campaign websites or third-party video sharing websites such as Youku and Tudou. Then interviews were conducted with marketers and agency management or execution staff to generate more insights. These data collection techniques produced rich information and descriptions of the cases and their context, including the company and brand overview, marketing campaign objectives, processes, and impacts, the motivation of using mobile media, and the role of mobile media in the campaigns. A database of the source evidence was maintained in order to separate the data collected from the researcher’s analysis and interpretations of the data (Yin, 2009).
Document analysis. Documents from both primary and secondary sources were gathered. Primary sources included corporate web pages, annual reports, press releases, speeches, product/service information, meetings minutes and agendas, marketing plans. In addition, campaign WAP sites and websites, and video archives were used as authentic sources of evidence for analysis to examine the working dynamism between different media channels, as well as user participation. Secondary sources, including press articles and marketing intelligence reports, were collected for analysis to provide corroboration or to add missing details that were consistent with the primary sources.
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They were screened to make sure they belonged to credible resources. The collected documents were stored in the case study database.
In-depth interviews. In-depth interviews were conducted with marketing or brand managers of the case company, planning or account personnel with traditional or mobile marketing agencies involved in marketing planning and execution for the case companies, as well as their partners such as mobile content/service providers. Potential informants were contacted via email to arrange an interview. Once the informant agreed to participate, two copies of the letter of information and the consent form were handed to the interviewee for him/her to read and sign before starting the interview. A copy of the signed letter was kept by the researcher as a form of consent, and the other copy kept by the informant. This procedure was similar to that taken in the interviews in Study One.
Interview questions focused on case companies’ adoption and use of mobile media in marketing strategies. They were allowed to talk freely about the case campaigns, its background, planning, execution, and result. Informants were actively involved. Specifically, the questions evolved around the following themes:
- campaign objectives, background, target consumers; - marketing strategies and execution; - use of the mobile media for value co-creation in marketing campaigns; - the role of the mobile media in facilitating content co-creation and consumption; - the centrality of the mobile media as text, tools or platforms; - the role of mobile media in facilitating the environment of the brand experience; - dynamics between mobile media and other media in the campaign; - the role of mobile media in facilitating individual or communal experience; - effect of mobile media in marketing campaigns; - campaign result.
The use of interviewees from both within and outside the case companies allowed converging lines of inquiry. Each interview was conducted in Mandarin Chinese or
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English, whichever was the interviewee’s native language. Each interview took approximately one hour at the interviewee’s office, and was recorded with the interviewee’s permission. Further, telephone interview was used as a complementary data collection method to face-to-face interview for follow-ups. The interviews were transcribed and those conducted in Mandarin Chinese were translated by the researcher, a bilingual Chinese native with a professional qualification in translation. The transcripts and translations were stored in the case study database.
To sum up, multiple methods were combined to elucidate complementary aspects of the phenomenon under investigation. The research was designed to enhance the understanding of the role of mobile media in facilitating co-creation brand experiences to cater to the Chinese consumers’ dual desires for individuality and social interaction. However, some limitations should be acknowledged, and relevant measures were taken to counteract the limitations.
Construct validity is especially problematic in case study research. It has been a source of criticism because of the potential for investigator subjectivity. Yin (2009) proposed three remedies to counteract this: using multiple sources of evidence, establishing a chain of evidence, and having a draft case study report reviewed by key informants. The researcher followed the first two pieces of advice to strengthen construct validity.
To increase reliability in case studies, the researcher followed the advice of Yin (2009) by using a case study database that contained all sources of data and reference material organized by the case, and separating the data collected from the researcher’s analysis and interpretations of the data. Triangulation of multiple sources of evidence, and the establishment of a chain of evidence also increases the reliability (Eisenhardt, 1989; Yin, 2009).
Internal validity is a concern when the researcher is making inferences to explain how and why event x led to event y when an event cannot be directly observed. This study adopted explanation building as suggested by Yin (2009) to address this problem.
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Another potential limitation relates to external validity, i.e. generalization of the results. As stated by Lee and Baskerville (2003: 240), “a theory may never be scientifically generalized to a setting where it has not yet been empirically tested and confirmed.” Therefore, as this study was conducted in the Chinese market, the results should be considered tentative for other countries. Though the context of this research places boundaries on the conclusions and implications that can be drawn from the study, these limitations should not endanger the reliability and validity of the findings. On this basis, further studies are needed to investigate the role of mobile media in marketing with companies in other lines of business and in other countries. This might generate valuable insights into how companies internationally utilize mobile media in their marketing practices to facilitate co-creation experiences.
3.3.5 Data analysis
Data analysis followed the strategy of developing a case description for each case, which served as a framework for organizing the case study before synthesising across cases. Eisenhardt (1989) suggested two step of data analysis: analysing within-case data, and searching for cross-case patterns. Within-case analysis can help investigators cope with the daunting volume of data. Detailed case study write-ups were developed for each case to generate insight and allow the unique patterns of each case to emerge before generalizing patterns across cases. The rich familiarity with each case also helps facilitate the cross-case comparison. Cross-case analysis helps the researcher to move beyond initial impressions of individual cases and to derive conclusions from the set of cases (Eisenhardt, 1989).
The secondary material and interview transcripts were analysed independently, and categorized by classifying the different units of data. Coding was conducted to identify pieces of data as representing, or being an example of, a phenomenon. Through this process the initial data was sorted, reduced, and reconstituted. Then the researcher conducted comparisons to explore differences and similarities across cases, which are presented in discussions in Chapter 10.
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The collected data were examined and analysed on an ongoing and iterative basis using a thematic analysis to generate tentative answers to the research question. Tentative answers were categorized into themes, until themes emerged that were well supported by all available information. In case the information was disconfirming, the researcher refined the research questions or methods according to necessity. Through the analytic process, the researcher remained open to new opportunities and insights.
To sum up, each case formed a whole study in which detailed descriptions and analysis were presented, and conclusions were based on evidence from various sources in the case study report. Cross-case analysis was then conducted to identify similarities and differences and search patterns and themes. Overall, data triangulation and iterative analysis resulted in common themes, which provided answers to RQ2.
3.4 Ethical consideration
This research was conducted in accordance with the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Research Involving Humans and the Queensland University of Technology ethics guidelines. The research involved interviewing and document analysis of companies’ internal documents, thus a Low Risk Ethical Clearance application was lodged for ethical review, and received approval.
3.5 Conclusion
This chapter explained how the research study was designed and implemented. It started by addressing the philosophical approach of this research. Then research methods were discussed for the two studies of the research. Specifics included the rationale for choosing the method, data collection, data analysis as well as the criteria for judging quality. The next chapter will report the findings of Study One, the adoption factors of mobile marketing in China.
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Chapter 4 Adoption factors of mobile marketing in China
Based on the review of the five characteristics of an innovation which affect its diffusion identified by Rogers, the TOE framework and the organizational adoption of mobile marketing in Chapter 2, this chapter reports and analyses the findings arising out of Study One (Section 3.2) to address RQ1. Specifically, it explores industry informants’ perceptions and experiences emerging from the interviews regarding factors in technological (Section 4.1), organizational (Section 4.2) and environmental (Section 4.3) contexts that influence the adoption of mobile marketing by consumer brand owners in China. A list of the 27 interviewees with their background was provided in Table 7 in Chapter 3. Secondary data were used to complement the interview data.
4.1 Technological context
This section discusses the factors in technological context: relative advantage (4.1.1), complexity (4.1.2), observability (4.1.3), perceived barrier (4.1.4) and compatibility (4.1.5).
Overall, findings showed that the much touted relative advantage is not a significant discriminator between adopters and non-adopters. Complexity and technological limits play a more important role in technological context than relative advantages in influencing adoption decisions by brand owners. Observability, compatibility with other media and existing marketing practices facilitates adoption of mobile marketing. The following sections provide an analysis of the interview data.
4.1.1 Relative advantage
Relative advantages of mobile marketing mentioned by the interviewees were: targeting capability, access to data about real users, immediate call-to-action, cost efficiency, and fresh consumer experience.
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Targeting capability. Mobile’s targeting capability was widely recognized. Interviewees mentioned various targeting dimensions, among which device type, geographical area, mobile data consumption history were cited most. For example, interviewees stated:
Mobile model and geographical area are very useful targeting dimensions, especially in a country with very fragmented device market and large geographical spread. Media consumption behaviour also helps marketers achieve more precise targeting. For traditional media like print and Internet, media content is the main targeting dimension. (MA3, Male)
Precise targeting makes mobile marketing more relevant for users; otherwise they would get annoyed at irrelevant and interruptive marketing. Brand owners are very concerned about that. (TA5, Female)
Targeting capability based on device models can help brand owners reach new markets. One interviewee gave an example where brand owners targeted Shanzhai2 mobile users to grow business in 3rd to 5th tier cities and rural areas.
In the project of “Home Appliances Going to the Countryside”, brand owners like Guo Mei and Su Ning leveraged mobile marketing to reach those rural residents. Most of them are Shanzhai mobile users, who want trendy mobile phones but with less purchasing power. In addition to home appliance, many brand owners who are looking for new growth point in 3rd-to 5th tier cities also leveraged the mobile media to reach their target consumers. (MA3, Male)
Targeting capability not only involves locating the right people, but also means approaching and interacting with them in ways appealing to them. For brand owners, finding the right approach to interact with the target consumers is critical to effective
2 Shanzhai literally means ‘mountain village’ in Chinese. The origins might stem from the medieval period when illegal products were produced far away in a remote mountain village, away from the law, as an act of rebellion against the emperor (S. Zhu & Shi, 2010, p. 31). At first Shanzhai mobile phones refer to ‘non-brand’ copycat products that feature multiple functions at incredibly low costs (CCID, 2009) produced by manufacturers clustered in the Pearl River Delta region in China to compete with the world-leading brands. Very quickly Shanzhai mobile device manufacturers are ‘transforming themselves into emerging indigenous adaptors and innovators, from not only industrial design and local demand capture perspectives but also core technological breakthroughs such integrated circuit (IC) chip design, whole phone system’s total solution and whole supply chain’s regional integrations’ (S. Zhu & Shi, 2010, p. 31).
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communication.
Whether people use mobile phones with strong music feature or camera feature, and which part of the country they come from make a difference in the way we approach them. (TA5, Female)
For some mobile marketing solution providers, the importance of segmentation of mobile media resources for better targeting was highlighted.
The most important thing for us now is to expand our publisher resources and segment these media in terms of traffic, content and target audience. This is the core value of our company for brand owners. (MA4, Male)
What makes targeting capability more valuable is the ubiquity and personal nature of the mobile phone. Its close connection with users offers continuous communication regardless of time and location. However, most interviewees pointed to the importance of gaining consumer consent considering the personal nature of the device.
Given their ubiquity, mobile phones and technologies can become the enablers of meaningful dialogues between customers and marketers anywhere anytime, if consumers give permission. (BO1, Male)
Consumer consent is a must, otherwise agencies risk losing their clients, and brand owners will get a brand backlash. (TA2, Male)
The result shows that the targeting capability of mobile marketing is perceived as a relative advantage in helping marketers reach and interact with their target consumers more effectively. Given user permission, ubiquity and the personal nature of the mobile media makes targeting capability more valuable and brand owners can have less concern about privacy matters. Mobile marketing solution providers and agencies see it as a core value of their business.
Access to data about real users. Most interviewees mentioned the relative advantage of mobile media in providing brand owners with information about users with real identity. This enabled them to track the communication process and to communicate with potential consumers over the long term. In the case of TV commercials or print ads, brand owners have no idea who watched or read their ads; in
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the case of the Internet via PC; all they can access are IP addresses. Interviewees mentioned that even when users were asked to leave their personal information, including mobile phone numbers, they could get around it. Real information about real people is a big selling point for brand owners.
On the Internet, very few users are willing to give their mobile numbers when they are asked to. If they have to at the time of registration, they either give you fake information or just couldn’t be bothered. Behind mobile, there is a real person with a unique mobile number, and brand owners have a clear idea of who have watched the ad, and who have come back. (MA6, Female)
Once consumers opt in, the database of real users also offers brand owners the opportunity for continuous communication. This is not new on the mobile phone, but interviewees pointed out that the difference lies in consumers being able to see messages delivered to them without acting on them.
This is different from the Internet experience where consumers need to do something first, such as logging in to a site or checking their emails. In the case of mobile, for example, consumers can get an alert message for car maintenance on mobile and they can see it right away. (MA5, Male)
Interviewees mentioned that access to mobile user data could improve consumer relationship management, especially in time-critical communications. Brand owners can take the initiative to reach consumers and communicate with them in time. As one interviewee said: “Imagine it’s a user’s birthday, that person can receive a “happy birthday” message from the brand owners without doing anything. Mobile can make CRM more efficient” (MA5, Male).
Mobile number and UA Profile, which includes information on mobile device model, are important data assets for operators. Brand owners advertising on the operator portal can get access to such information. China Mobile’s exclusive mobile marketing agency has such an advantage. As revealed by its sales director, “Mobile numbers of Monternet users are automatically captured, if users opt in. This platform is unique” (MA6, Female).
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Off-deck mobile sites can also capture users’ mobile numbers through technological means, which was perceived as valuable data by brand owners.
We capture users’ mobile numbers as default information at registration, and users cannot change them. The real identity as well as the mobile phone number helps to create bigger value for brand owners. This is a big difference from Internet sites. (CP/SP3, Male)
However, it is safe to say that access to use data was, to some extent, controlled by the operators. This is evidenced by the fact that China Mobile stopped transmitting users’ mobile phone numbers and UA Profiles to WAP sites at the end of 2005, as mentioned earlier. Although the technological means of capturing user data definitely added appeal to mobile marketing for brand owners, the tension in the industry environment, especially the operators’ policy, reduce its appeal. This will be discussed in further details in the section on conflicts of interest among industry players (See Section 4.3.4) in the environmental context.
Immediate call-to-action. Most interviewees mentioned the immediate call-to-action function of the mobile, which could enhance interactivity with potential consumers. They stressed the importance of interactivity and the capability of the mobile to drive actions at the point of inspiration or the point of purchase.
Without interactivity, it is hardly possible to change people’s attitude. People who sit passively before TV sets only have an impression of what they have seen, if they watch it at all, but they cannot take actions immediately. Mobile is a solution to that. (CP/SP6, Male)
Owing to the multi-functionality of the mobile phone and its convergence with the Internet, interviewees perceived the mobile as being more effective in getting a consumer response. One interviewee mentioned a successful mobile marketing campaign for a client leveraging this relative advantage, “People were asked to take photos and upload to the Internet. As they can easily upload the photos immediately after capturing them via mobile phone, mobile uploads accounted for more than 98% all uploads” (MA6, Female).
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The location awareness of the mobile was perceived to enhance the immediate call-to-action function. As one interviewee put it, ‘Given consumer consent, when prospective consumers are within range of the stores, they are more likely to respond’ (CP/SP1, Male).
However, high response rates are not always the case. Another interviewee mentioned a not-so-successful campaign where they provided a mobile voting channel via SMS. It turned out not many people voted via mobile phone. As he explained:
The conversion rate is relatively low, because they can easily do it on PC as the campaign was based on the Internet. If users were in an environment where they did not have easy access to PC, then mobile would be critical to engage them. (MA5, Male)
Therefore the high response rates of mobiles can only be fully brought into effect when the ubiquity of the mobile gives it a critical role in the whole campaign rather than as a support to participation via the PC.
With its call-to-action capability, the mobile phone also becomes complementary to other media with a more visual nature. A line that prompts readers to go to the mobile site for more information, for example, is an easy way to lead viewers of print or TV commercials to more information right away. As one interviewee pointed out,
Brand owners have to be concise in print advertising or TV commercials; they cannot put every detail there, such as promotion or event plans. Now with the mobile, consumers can immediately know more about the brands or their products, the promotions, the events and much more if they are interested. In this case, the print advertising serves the purpose of brand building, and the mobile is used to drive actions or sales. Mobile to some extent becomes a solution to the tug of the war between brand building and sales. (MA5, Male)
Another interviewee gave more examples where brand owners adopted mobile marketing to drive sales. Skincare and cosmetics brands usually distribute mobile coupons to registered users and invite them to go to the store counters to get samples. Car brands typically invite users to a test drive or an offline event. By driving users to stores or offline events, mobile marketing can send potential consumers right to the
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brand owner’s sales force. Mobile marketing is also “good for restaurant promotion owing to its capability to generate action and drive sales” (BO3, Male). As summarized by one interviewee, “Compared to other media, mobile is closer to the final link of sales owing to the call-to-action capability, and can drive sales more effectively” (MA6, Female).
In addition to driving interaction with brands, the mobile can also enhance interaction among consumers and create a viral effect for brands. When people see entertaining or useful content, or interesting campaigns, they can forward it to their friends or invite them to be a part of it. For brand owners, forwarding is a simple add-on feature of any mobile marketing campaign, where they can get the bonus of the viral effect while keeping costs down. As one interviewee revealed, almost all of the clients included a forwarding function in their mobile marketing campaigns, where people can forward the message or invite friends to participate a campaign (MA5, Male).
Interviewees also pointed out those immediate responses from consumers could enable brand owners to adjust their approaches to achieve better results. In the case of mobile ads, it is easy for brand owners to adjust ad versions, positions or mobile sites based on consumer response. When a mobile is used as a tool to engage people and generate actions, brand owners can also refine the campaign design to maximize its effectiveness.
The capability of driving actions and getting quick response from people, together with the real-time visibility of the result enables brand owners to optimize their approach for better outcomes. If an offer isn’t delivering results, it is very easy to update the offer as often as necessary. (TA2, Female)
Therefore mobile media was seen as having the relative advantage of eliciting response and generating actions owing to its multi-functionality, ubiquity, location-awareness and the convergence with the Internet, though the context is also important in generating high response rate. Brand owners can interact with their target consumers more efficiently, and can seize the opportunity to win over consumers when they come to visit their stores or participate in offline events. The real-time visibility of
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people’s response was perceived as an opportunity to optimize the approach for more return on investment.
Cost efficiency. Most interviewees perceived mobile marketing to be more cost-efficient than traditional marketing. For agencies, this is an opportunity to win over brand owners.
Brand owners would consider using mobile media when we can prove mobile is a more cost-effective way to target and communicate with their potential consumers. For example, mobile loyalty program is quite popular among our clients, as the cost of DM is much higher and e-DM does not get read very often. (MA6, Female)
The precise targeting and call-to-action capabilities of mobile marketing were believed to help achieve better returns on investment. The cost-effectiveness is particularly evident when the performance measurement is based on CPC (cost per click) or CPA (cost per action).
On traditional Internet, for every 1,000,000 page views, only about 1% of the viewers would click through to the end, let alone generating actions. Mobile marketing with more precise targeting and call-to-action capabilities is more cost effective. Some brand owners have already realized that, especially in FMCG and cosmetics industry. That’s why they use mobile marketing to enhance product awareness. (CP/SP6, Male)
However, some interviewees pointed out that the cost-efficiency of mobile marketing hinges on other factors. Easy opt-in and friendly user experience are important pre-conditions. As one interviewee said, “You can’t just take cost-effectiveness for granted, of course. Who would be bothered to click through or opt in if the process is too complicated or even not easy to understand” (MA3, Male)?
To ensure friendly user experience, many interviewees mentioned that the fragmented device market raises the production cost for brand owners. This will be discussed later in the section on the perceived barriers of mobile technologies (See section 4.1.4).
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While most interviewees mentioned the cost efficiency of mobile marketing provided there is an easy opt-in and friendly user experience, some were negative about it.
Room promotions need to be more spread out throughout the country to be effective, and as very few people among mobile users are our target consumers, the cost factors will creep in. (BO4, Male)
Overall, cost efficiency was perceived by most interviewees as a relative advantage for mobile marketing. Brand owners who are convinced of its cost efficiency are more likely to adopt mobile marketing. While mobile marketing has the potential to be more cost effective, it hinges on other factors in execution to bring out the potential advantage.
Fresh consumer experience. As an emerging practice, mobile marketing was perceived as a way of delivering fresh experiences to target consumers and to refresh brands. One interviewee cited Toyota Corolla as an example. In 2007 Toyota launched its 10th-generation Corolla, in which they introduced big changes to the original model to move up to a more premium position. In addition to a renaming strategy, something else needed to be done to refresh the brand, especially when it had ten years of history. Mobile marketing was the answer. As mentioned by the interviewee, “mobile delivers a fresh experience for people, and that’s what Corolla needed” (MA5, Male).
However, interviewees also pointed out that as people become more familiar with mobile marketing, the novelty effect may subside. As one interviewee at the agency said, “while mobile marketing was very new back in 2006, it is less so now, although it’s still early stage. It all comes down to the creative idea more than mobile media itself ” (TA2, Female).
Overall, fresh consumer experience was perceived as a competitive advantage at the early stage. Over time the novelty effect may subside for brand owners to adopt mobile marketing. Creative idea will be more important than technologies, as with other media.
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4.1.2 Complexity
In relation to complexity, interviewees mentioned it from two perspectives: consumers as users of mobile media and brand owners as users of mobile marketing solutions. Both have impacts on brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing. This section discusses complexity from brand owners’ perspective. The impact of complexity from consumers’ perspective of brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing will be discussed in the section on consumer readiness (See Section 4.3.2).
For brand owners, the degree of complexity in understanding, designing, executing, measuring and monitoring mobile marketing campaigns influences their adoption decision. The diversity of mobile marketing technologies and forms, fragmentation of devices and operating systems, fragmentation of mobile networks and ad inventory, as well as the insufficient supply and fragmented expertise of mobile marketing agencies are among the most cited reasons. The diversity of mobile marketing technologies and forms, as well as the fragmentation of devices and operating systems, are discussed in this section. Other factors, including fragmented mobile networks and ad inventory, and the lack of competent agencies, will be analysed in the section on market supply in environmental context (See Section 4.3.3).
The diversity of mobile marketing technologies and forms. A rich variety of mobile marketing technologies are available for brand owners to choose from, including messaging, mobile Internet advertising, mobile applications, Bluetooth, AR technologies, 2D barcode, location-based technologies, and much more. Some are more complicated than others, and it takes time and effort for brand owners to grasp the knowledge in the new territory. As one interviewee said, “The need to talk with different technology and solution providers with different expertise in mobile marketing campaigns is intimidating for brand owners. It is more complicated than media purchase” (CP/SP6, Male).
Brand owners need to know not only about mobile marketing technologies and solutions, but also about target consumers’ usage behaviour. As one interviewee pointed
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out, “Brand owners face a learning curve for each mobile technology before they decide to adopt it” (MA3, Male). Another interviewee mentioned the need to have the knowledge about user behaviour across various technologies:
Various technologies add to the complexity when it comes to adoption decision. Brand owners need to understand their target consumers’ behaviour in mobile; for example, what kind of mobile devices they use, and how they divide their time across various mobile media. (TA2, Female)
The technological complexity is, to some extent, associated with, and complicated by, the tension in the environmental context where different media content or service providers and solution providers co-exist. This will be discussed in later sections on environmental context (Section 4.3.3 and Section 4.3.4).
Fragmentation of devices and operating systems. In addition to a diversity of mobile marketing technologies and forms, interviewees reported that fragmented device and operating systems adds to the complexity in mobile marketing. This poses challenges to the adoption of mobile marketing in terms of providing optimal user experience. What complicates the issue further is that Shanzhai mobile phones are particular to the Chinese market. Shanzhai handsets have, to some extent, promoted the adoption of mobile data service, as price-sensitive users can get smart phones at lower prices and enjoy mobile data services. However, they have posed serious challenges to content provision and mobile marketing as it is hard to optimize content for these mobiles, which may have a Nokia look and an iPhone screen size (S. L. Zhang, 2008).
In Japan developers only need to develop one set of applications or systems for one operator, but in China developers need to come up with a lot more for various models of mobile phones, maybe 30 to 40 models. Plus we have a big market for Shanzhai products here. This is a big hurdle, and also drives up costs. (CP/SP1, Male)
In the past some brand owners or agencies thought mobile media purchase would be nothing much different from Internet media purchase. As mobile phones with bigger screens became available on the market, they found original banners could not fit any more. They have come to realize the importance of optimization, which would take a lot of effort and they would be better off to outsource it to a specialist in this. (MA3, Male)
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The fragmentation leads to complexity not only in display optimization but also in content format, which could lead to separate creative development and production processes. As one interviewee said of his experience, “As iPhone cannot support flash, we have to come up with an alternative content format when brand owners need to target iPhone users. This complicates the creative development as well as production process, and it’s very time-consuming” (MA3, Male).
Brand owners face a steep learning curve in understanding the complexities of a diverse range of mobile marketing technologies and forms. Fragmentation adds to the complexity in planning and executing mobile marketing. These are perceived as barriers to brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing.
4.1.3 Observability
Regarding observability, “the degree to which the results of an innovation are visible” (Rogers, 2003, p.258), interviewees mentioned both mobile media’s observability and its observability against other media.
Mobile’s observabiliity. Most interviewees mentioned that the call-to-action capability is helpful in delivering a transparent result when it comes to performance measurement. Compared to the often inflated numbers of impressions and clicks, solid evidence of user actions are what brand owners are more comfortable with. Call-to-action means more value for brand owners as the mobile brings potential consumers to them, rather than them being invisible souls behind the screens.
As cheat technologies may be used in CPM (cost per thousand impressions) and CPC model, CPA becomes a good way to measure the performance. It gives brand owners a better idea of the reliable results. Many of our clients have used mobile coupons and mobile registration to either drive store visits or find potential users for particular campaigns or long-term communication. They are real people. (MA6, Female)
Some interviewees mentioned that mobile payment provides a convenient way of measuring the result in terms of sales. The possibility of a closed loop for mobile
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marketing is a drive for firms’ adoption.
If mobile payment picks up, it would drive the adoption of mobile marketing as the performance can be measured through sales more easily. Currently CPS (cost per sales) model is popular among SPs, as users already have the habit of purchasing content and value-added services on mobile. It is easy to make the payment through messaging, pre-paid cards, and e-payment. (CP/SP3, Male)
Mobile’s observability against other media. Interviewees noted that all forms of mobile marketing do not have an equal footing in observability. When measurement is not based on CPA or CPS, brand owners could only know how many people watched the ads, but have no idea of how many people actually make the purchase because of mobile marketing. This is a typical concern, as it is with traditional media. Therefore some interviewees also mentioned the importance of knowing how the mobile performs in comparison to other media.
It is important that the mobile metrics can be easily included into the advertisers’ dashboard side by side with other media metrics. This gives brand owners a clear view of their return on investment in each media, and the enhanced observability may drive their adoption of mobile marketing. (TA1, Male)
Observability was perceived as a driver for mobile marketing adoption when the result is measured by action or sales. However, observability of mobile marketing is no better than traditional media in cases such as advertising for brand building. Therefore, a cross-media comparison will give brand owners a clear view of each media’s effectiveness, which makes them more likely to adopt mobile marketing owing to its enhanced observability.
4.1.4 Perceived barrier
The two most mentioned technological barriers during the interviews were network speed and limited visual impact.
Network speed. Most interviewees mentioned that network speed still limits marketers’ creative ideas, which could be hard to execute. User-generated content, especially audio and video content, requires high network speed. Unsatisfactory user
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experience could be costly to brand owners, which explains why network speed is a constraint to adoption. As one interviewee said, “ Video can be easily captured via mobile, but without the fast enough network speed, uploading would be a pain to users” (MA6, Female).
When asked about the impact of the introduction of the high-speed 3G technologies on mobile marketing, most interviewees said that it will still take time to see mass user adoption of 3G services, and the current small number of 3G users did not justify the adoption of 3G-based marketing solution. As one interviewee from the VC firm put it: “Brand owners would only do something where there is a critical mass. Currently 2G and 2.5G users still accounts for a significant part of market” (VC1, Male). Most interviewees perceived the significance of 3G more in raising brand owners’ awareness of mobile marketing.
It would take a long time for the launch of 3G to have a real impact on mobile marketing. The good thing is 3G gets brand owners more interested. It’s not necessary they would adopt mobile marketing immediately but it makes them more open to exploring what mobile media can offer. (CP/SP7, Male)
Network speed was perceived as a barrier to mobile marketing adoption. Although 3G comes with a faster network speed, brand owners still found network speed a constraint owing to limited user adoption. Therefore higher-speed technologies alone do not drive the adoption of mobile marketing. Consumer adoption is also important, as marketers need to follow where their potential consumers are.
Limited visual impact. Small screen limits communicability and visual impact, which was frequently quoted as a technological barrier to firms’ adoption of mobile marketing.
For example, text links used to be a major form of mobile advertising, and they cannot evade the word limit. As one interviewee explained: “A text link is often 8-12 Chinese characters long, and it is very hard to communicate things through with this word limit” (MA5, Male).
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As brand owners still see visual effect as one measurement of media impact, the mobile was perceived to be at a disadvantage when compared with other media. As one interviewee said: “Mobile obviously lacks the visual impact as that of the TV or outdoor advertising. This is one of the reasons why TV or outdoor accounts for a big part of the marketing budget, especially for brand building” (MA4, Male).
Most interviewees mentioned that various formats, such as pictures, audio and video, on mobile would become more common, especially as the network speed went up and data fees went down. Brand owners would be able to communicate with target consumers through a wider range of content formats without worrying about incurring huge costs for users. One interviewee mentioned that his agency had employed mobile flash advertising for several clients,
A typical mobile flash only costs 5k to 7k traffic. Data fees are going down, and in most areas it only costs 5 yuan for 30M a month. Brand owners like flashes because it has a better visual impact than text links or pictures. (MA3, Male)
While various mobile content forms and technologies have become more common, it still remains a question regarding how marketing should be done. Brand owners need to address the practical issues in execution before they can adopt these new forms of mobile marketing. One interviewee cited mobile video marketing as an example. He emphasized that brand owners need to exercise caution against annoying viewers, and negotiate their interests with online video service providers over the small screen.
People talk about mobile video. How long should it be then? One minute or two minutes? How many seconds are left for video advertising? If it’s seven seconds, what price should it be? These are all pending issues. We still need to figure out how mobile marketing should be done. (SP/CP1, Male)
As bandwidth goes up and cost goes down, brand owners will find that more forms of mobile content can be used to generate an impact. However, there is still a gap between technological possibilities and their application in mobile marketing. This involves different actors in environmental contexts who need to negotiate their interests in adopting new forms of mobile marketing.
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4.1.5 Compatibility
Interviewees mentioned three kinds of compatibility: with traditional media, with the Internet and broadcasting networks, and with existing marketing practice.
With traditional media. Though mobile marketing finds its origin in stand-alone SMS advertising, or in most cases, spamming, and now can be done independently on mobile Internet, all interviewees agreed that its value is better brought out when integrated into the whole marketing campaign. The ubiquity of the mobile phone makes it a convenient link to other media, which augments the campaign effects through integration. As one interviewee said,
The mobile is always with us. It is with us in the whole consumption process from the beginning of purchase consideration to willingness to final payment; it is with us when we are exposed to other media, TV, print, outdoor, and Internet. Therefore, mobile is the best tool to link together other media and deliver an integrated marketing campaign. (CP/SP2, Male)
The interactive nature and the multi-functionality of mobile phone make it a good tool to engage people on various occasions. Bluetooth, SMS and camera were mentioned most in the interviews.
Multiple functions of mobile phone such as SMS, camera, and Bluetooth makes it easy to be integrated with other media. (TA2, Female)
With the Internet and broadcasting networks. Most interviewees mentioned that the convergence between fixed and mobile Internet is also a force driving the adoption of mobile marketing. Although mobile marketing is not about the extension of Internet marketing, some interviewees mentioned that it is an easy start for brand owners, especially for those who have already adopted Internet marketing. For example, “some brand owners start by integrating mobile marketing in their digital campaigns, as it is easy to extend what they do on the Internet to mobile” (CP/SP2, Male).
The national agenda on the convergence between broadcasting, Internet and telecom networks is also believed to drive the adoption of mobile marketing. However,
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there are challenges in execution, especially regarding user experience and effectiveness measurement. As one interviewee explained,
Each of the three screens has its own characteristics and usage environment. Their particularities need to be considered when it comes to convergence. True integration is very important, otherwise brand owners would find their investment in two screens with 80% of the audience reach overlapping. In addition, frequency cap is important because brand owners may only need a person to see the ad for three times and that is enough. In the past, we did frequency cap on mobile media. In future, we need to consider how to do frequency cap across media. It is very challenging but still possible in China, because the networks are all owned by the state. (MA3, Male)
As media convergence happens not only at technological level, but also at the content level, successful commercials on other media may drive brand owners to extend that to mobile media, often by adapting the commercial into mobile content. Mobile marketing was seen as the opportunity to replicate the success of marketing effort on other media, and to maximize the value of the creative idea. One interviewee gave an example, “Motorola had a very successful TV commercial and then they wanted a mobile version of that. So we created a mobile game based on the storyboard of the TV commercial” (CP/SP7, Male).
With existing marketing practice. In addition to media convergence, the opportunity to connect to the current marketing practice was also quoted as driving the adoption of mobile marketing. One interviewee mentioned the mobile click-to-call approach as an example: “They need to have a call centre if they want to do a click-to-call campaign. Brand owners like Dell and those in financial services adopt mobile marketing to drive sales, as they have back-end support in place” (MA3, Male).
Some interviewees pointed out that the mature marketing mindset and practice can give brand owners an easy start when extending the existing knowledge and experience to the mobile, although they also need to consider a mobile’s particularities. As one interviewee said, “Those who have a stronger awareness of the importance of user segmentation and precise targeting are more driven to look into the mobile marketing opportunities” (MA6, Female).
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Compatibility arising from media convergence at both technological and content level drives the adoption of mobile marketing, which also comes with challenges in executing user experience optimization and performance measurement. Existing media technologies and marketing processes adopted by brand owners can also serve as a good foundation to which mobile marketing can be connected.
4.2 Organizational Context
While technological factors certainly influence brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing, organizational factors also make brand owners differ in their adoption decisions. This section discusses factors in the organizational context: innovation orientation (Section 4.2.1); target market fit (Section 4.2.2); organizational readiness (Section 4.2.3); top management support (Section 4.2.4); and firm size (Section 4.2.5).
The findings of the interviews show that innovation-orientation, target market fit, and organizational readiness in terms of human and financial resources are significant drivers of adoption decisions. Top management support assumes a relatively smaller role in driving the adoption, and firm size has a positive influence on adoption decisions.
4.2.1 Innovation orientation
Interviewees pointed out that innovation-oriented organizations are more likely to adopt mobile marketing and innovation-oriented brand owners tend to keep themselves abreast of cutting-edge media technologies. As one interviewee put it, “Those early adopters of mobile marketing such as Nike and Coke are also early adopters of other new media technologies” (MA3, Male). Those organizations tend to be more willing to experiment with mobile marketing and have more tolerance for failures and risks.
By contrast, while some conservative brand owners show interest in understanding more about mobile marketing, they hesitate to go ahead with it. As most brand owners themselves do not understand mobile media, risk-averse brand owners think twice before venturing into this unknown territory.
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Most local brand owners are pretty risk-averse. They don’t want to take risks in new media. They wait for someone else to do it and see how things are going, and they need to see successful cases and proven results before following suit. (CP/SP7, Male)
When brand owners are more innovative, they are more likely to adopt mobile marketing. Brand owners who are less innovative tend to be more cautious.
4.2.2 Target market fit
Most interviewees mentioned the fit between brand owners’ target market and mobile media users as an important factor in brand owners’ adoption decision. Brand owners want to know user demographics of mobile media to “see whether the mobile serves their purpose of reaching and engaging the right people” (CP/SP2, Male).
Generally speaking, brand owners targeting the youth market tend to adopt mobile marketing. As mobile media find more users among young people, these brand owners will need to follow their target consumers in terms of media usage habit. As one interviewee said: “The motivation to adopt mobile marketing comes from consumers. Most brand owners we have come into contact with are those targeting the youth market, as young people are active mobile media users in their daily lives” (CP/SP6, Male).
In addition to the youth market, brand owners who target potential consumers of mobile products or services are also found to be more motivated to adopt mobile marketing. For example, mobile is a good way of reaching potential consumers of mobile banking services because “it is easier to convert mobile users to mobile banking service users” (MA6, Female).
However, it is not all about a happy match. Some brand owners do not adopt mobile marketing as they see it as “used most frequently by less-educated or low-income users, who are not their potential consumers” (CP/SP3, Male). Another interviewee also expressed his concern that only a small part of the whole mobile Internet population was their potential consumers (BO3, Male).
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Despite the fact that the majority of mobile users are young, less educated, with low income at this stage, which is undergoing structural change (CNNIC, 2010b), some brand owners regard relevance as being more important than reach. They adopt mobile marketing as they “value more the opportunity to connect with the right people” (CP/SP7, Male). As one interviewee optimistically pointed out: “Although there are people who may not be our clients’ target consumers, this is where precise targeting comes in” (MA6, Female).
Overall, the current demographics of mobile media users is a driving force for some brand owners and a barrier for others, as far as mobile marketing adoption is concerned. Some brand owners find that precise targeting makes up for other shortages. It is safe to say that as mobile media diffuses beyond young people, the less educated and those with low-incomes, more brand owners may find that the mobile is a good platform to reach and engage potential consumers.
4.2.3 Organizational readiness
Human resources. Many interviewees pointed out that as marketing directors and managers are the actual decision makers, their knowledge of mobile marketing and media usage habit have a great influence in the decision of brand owners to adopt a mobile marketing strategy.
At the moment, mobile device manufacturers are active in mobile marketing because their marketing people as well as other staff understand mobile media and mobile marketing. We don’t need to spend much effort in educating them, and there are sparks when we communicate with them. (MA5, Male)
As “more and more mobile marketing managers have become sophisticated mobile media users themselves”, these decision-makers “understand better about mobile media and mobile marketing ad what they can get from it, therefore are more open to the idea of adoption” (MA6, Female).
If the marketing managers and directors are not mobile media users themselves, and are not willing to leave their comfort zone and adapt to the change in consumers’
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media usage habit, interviewees pointed out it would be hard to convince them to adopt mobile marketing. As one interviewee explained: “They are reluctant to change the established ways of doing things, for fear of showing their inadequacy” (MA2, Male).
Therefore marketing managers and directors, as decision makers, play a very important role in organizations’ adoption of mobile marketing. As they adopt mobile media as individuals, they have a better understanding of mobile media and mobile marketing. More importantly, their keen sense of consumer media behaviour, their willingness to learn about mobile marketing and adapt to the change equip them with the necessary knowledge and an open attitude. This is an important factor in organizational readiness, in terms of human resources, in driving mobile marketing adoption.
Financial resources. Some interviewees quote limited budget as a reason why brand owners do not adopt mobile marketing. As mobile marketing comes after other more traditional media, limited budget sometimes simply leaves no place for mobile. As one interviewee explained: “I have been in touch with a consumer electronics brand owner for many times. Their problem is the lack of budget, and they assign the limited budget to established media like TV ad” (MA5, Male). This was more evident during the financial crisis. Some interviewees reported that brand owners were “more cautious when committing budget to mobile marketing, and need to be convinced about its cost-effectiveness compared to more traditional marketing” (CP/SP6, Male).
A few interviewees found that some brand owners adopt mobile marketing when they “stress more return on investment under the pressure of the limited budget” (TA2, Male). Limited financial resources means that brand owners need to “squeeze budget from somewhere else” for mobile marketing, for example, “innovation budget” (MA3, Male) or “digital media budget” (CP/SP7, Male).
Overall, financial resources were perceived by the majority of interviewees to be a barrier to mobile marketing adoption. Brand owners tend to play safe with traditional media when budget is tight. While brand owners may be pushed to seek more return on
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investment and therefore adopt mobile marketing when convinced of its cost-effectiveness, they have to squeeze the budget for mobile marketing from elsewhere.
4.2.4 Top management support
Interviewees did not talk much about top management support during the interviews. Some interviewees mentioned the role of top management support in signalling the importance of mobile marketing. In some cases, it is related to the innovation-orientation of the organization, where “the top management’s support for innovation motivates mid-level decision-makers to try mobile marketing” (CP/SP6, Male). Another interviewee, from an agency, also shared this view: “Some of our clients adopt mobile marketing mainly because this can be seen as an innovative effort, which is encouraged by their top management” (TA2, Female).
Therefore top management has some influence on mobile marketing adoption, mainly as an innovative effort. However, as one interviewee said: “top management usually don’t have enough knowledge about mobile marketing, and are not sure about its effectiveness” (CP/SP6, Male). In such cases top management would not play an important role in driving mobile marketing adoption.
While top management support can drive adoption, the consensus among interviewees was that top management plays a less important role than mid-management decision makers such as marketing directors and mangers.
4.2.5 Firm size
Overall, interviewees’ responses show that bigger firms tend to have a more mature marketing mindset and apply practices that facilitate mobile marketing adoption. Smaller firms, however, lack such a mindset and also resources, and therefore are less likely to adopt mobile marketing.
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As one interviewee explained: “Small and medium-sized businesses would rather invest in the proven media or stress quick sales conversions. For example, some would rather give commissions to distributors than spend money on marketing campaigns, let alone new medium” (CP/SP3, Male).
MadSmart serves as a typical example to illustrate this point. It was an ad network started by Madhouse for small and medium businesses in 2007, but was terminated at the end of 2008. When asked why the service was terminated, the CEO explained:
It was still too early. Small and medium-sized businesses do not have the mindset or budget to build mobile Internet sites. Without these sites, where can consumers go after they click an ad on media publishers? Even for those who had mobile sites, not many had the awareness to promote them. A lot of them built the site only for the purpose of getting the domain name they wanted without having a follow-up marketing strategy…For us, it was hard to educate and kick off such a market. (MA3, Male)
In Internet marketing, Google and Baidu have scaled up their keyword bidding business from small and medium-sized firms because these firms have had their websites up and running. That is where web building and operation service providers come in. Further, these firms have developed, over time, the mindset to market their websites and generate awareness to convert it to clicks and sales. The same logic applies to mobile Internet. It is hard for mobile Internet ad networks targeting small businesses to grow before these firms have their mobile sites ready. Just as in the case of MadSmart, Madhouse cannot hit the market ahead of mobile website building and operational service providers.
Overall, bigger firms were perceived as having a more mature marketing mindset and practice, which facilitates their adoption of mobile marketing. As marketing has a short history in China, small and medium-sized businesses with limited resources still have a long way to go to develop a mature marketing mindset and practices. However, as mobile can be a democratizing technology for users (Cartier, Castells, & Qiu, 2006), this could also be the case for smaller firms, as in the case of Internet marketing. Mobile marketing can serve the purpose of smaller firms, which may focus more on driving
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sales, owing to its multi-functionality and call-to-action capability mentioned previously. It takes time for smaller firms to gain such a mindset and adopt mobile marketing for their purposes.
4.3 Environmental context
The factors emerging in the environmental context are: competitive pressure (Section 4.3.1); consumer readiness (Section 4.3.2); market supply (Section 4.3.3); market education (Section 4.3.4); operator attitude (Section 4.3.5); and regulatory environment (Section 4.3.6).
4.3.1 Competitive pressure
The consensus among interviewees was that competitive pressure forces marketers to look for innovative ways to “deliver fresh brand experiences to attract new consumers and retain the existing ones” (CP/SP7, Male).
Further, competitors’ feasibility study and adoption of mobile marketing leads their competitors to examine opportunities and to think about how mobile media might serve their purposes. Although they do not necessarily follow their competitors, they become more aware of mobile marketing and are open to the idea of adoption.
Brand owners usually express more interest when they know their competitions have adopted or are considering adopting mobile marketing. Non-adoption would put them at a competitive disadvantage. (CP/SP6, Male)
Competitive pressure raises their awareness of mobile marketing. They are more willing to look into the feasibility of mobile marketing, but they would not blindly follow their competitors. They also look at how mobile can play its role to achieve their marketing objectives. (TA2, Female)
Therefore firms are more likely to adopt mobile marketing under competitive pressure, either to differentiate them from their competitors or to capitalize on the same opportunity.
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4.3.2 Consumer readiness
Three main themes emerged from the interviews regarding the impact of consumer readiness on brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing. These are mobile phone and mobile Internet penetration; user sophistication; consumer attitude towards mobile marketing.
Mobile phone and mobile Internet penetration. Interviewees all agreed that the wide population of mobile users in China is a driver for brand owners to adopt mobile marketing. As one interviewee put it: “As China is leapfrogging in user adoption and use of mobile technologies, it drives marketers to think how these technologies can be used to engage their target consumers” (IC2, Male). The growing number of mobile Internet users and the structural change of the mobile Internet user demographics also drive firms’ mobile marketing adoption.
It’s not about pure numbers of how many mobiles are sold; what’s important is that a lot of people here are connected to the Internet via mobile, and the number of these people is growing. This has led many brand owners to value mobile marketing. (CP/SP7, Male)
Young, less educated people with low income, such as students and migrant workers accounted for a large part of mobile Internet users in 2006 and 2007, but the demographics are changing, though slowly. Mobile Internet has diffused to a wider population with various backgrounds. This drives mobile marketing adoption by brand owners. (MA6, Female)
According to Nielsen’s Mobile Insights Report on China (Phillips, 2010), despite less advanced networks, mobile consumers in China have surpassed their American counterparts in terms of using the devices to access the Internet, which is 38% of Chinese mobile subscribers compared to 27% of American mobile subscribers. The “increasing affordability of smart phones” (MA1, Male) and “data usage” (VC1, Male) as well as the “booming content and service market” (CP/SP6, Male) were quoted during the interviews as the drivers of the growth of mobile Internet users. This in turn drives firms’ adoption of mobile marketing.
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However, while recognizing that the data fee is not necessarily high, some interviewees pointed out that the complicated, confusing and non-transparent data plans prevent users from staying long on mobile Internet. The relatively short time spent on mobile compared to the time spent on PC discourages brand owners from adopting mobile marketing.
It is not clear or easy to understand, and it varies among different operators. For example, China Mobile charges users based on traffic, but not many users have any clue about how much traffic they would consume when visiting a mobile website or downloading a song. China Unicom’s charge is based on data package, but users have a hard time in figuring out what’s included in a data package. Therefore users are wary about the time they spend on the mobile Internet. (MA5, Male)
User behaviour on PC and mobile are two worlds apart. People can spend much time before PC doing a lot of stuff, but on mobile it’s usually used in fragmented times and brand owners need to get their attention in a very short time. If you read on mobile for 15 minutes, you get tired. (SP/CP1, Male)
Overall, all interviewees perceived that the huge mobile user base and the growing number of mobile Internet users with increasingly diversified demographic backgrounds serve as facilitators for mobile marketing adoption. However, the time spent on mobile media, owing to the confusing and complicated data charges as well as the culture of the fragmented time in mobile media usage, is still a barrier for firms’ adoption of mobile marketing.
User sophistication. Despite the ongoing diffusion of mobile device and mobile Internet, many interviewees cited insufficient user sophistication in mobile technologies as a barrier for brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing. Brand owners were reluctant to use certain technologies for fear of raising a high entry barrier for users. As one interviewee said: “Even for mobile Internet users, it may not be a smooth process to go through complicated steps to download and install mobile applications, let alone those who do not go online via mobile” (IC1, Male). Another interviewee mentioned: “not a few users simply do not know how to turn on the Bluetooth on their mobile phones” (MA5, Male). The high entry barrier means increasing cost for brand owners.
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It may cost 20 or 30 RMB per click since some users may not download the application after the clicks, or may not download it successfully. So a 200,000 RMB marketing budget may only bring 10,000 people, and there may be only 1,000 people who continue to participate in the campaign. Why brand owners should go through all the troubles for such a small scale? (MA3, Male)
This obstacle is multiplied by the typically short interaction session with mobile. As one interviewee explained: “If you cannot make things easy for them from installations to understanding how to use it, you lose them. It’s unlike PC, which allows users to take time to explore” (CP/SP7, Male).
User sophistication has an impact on the effectiveness and cost of mobile marketing, which influence brand owners’ adoption decision. Marketing solutions involving complicated mobile technologies erect formidable obstacles for users, especially within the short time they stay on the mobile. This reduces brand owners’ opportunity to reach the target audiences and interact with them, and it raises the cost for them to achieve a certain level of reach and interaction. Therefore it inhibits brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing.
User attitudes towards mobile marketing. Many interviewees mentioned the negative impact of spamming on user attitudes towards the whole universe of mobile marketing. This was perceived as a barrier to mobile marketing adoption. According to the 2010 Survey Report on mobile SMS usage in China (Internet Society of China, 2010), spamming not only annoys consumers because of its interruptive and invasive nature (50.6% of users), but also because it generates concerns over fraud (45% of users). Therefore this has negatively impacted the mobile marketing industry as users’ distrust in spam messages extends to mobile marketing. Now some brand owners are reluctant to adopt mobile marketing for fear of being associated with spammers. As one interviewee said: “People are very negative about spamming, and that attitude has a negative impact on mobile marketing. We do not want to associate ourselves with spammers” (BO3, Male).
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Other than that, consumers are willing to respond to permission-based mobile marketing that provides them with value. This was perceived as a driver for brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing. As one interviewee explained: “Users would not be willing to go through all the trouble to download the application just to participate a marketing campaign, if it doesn’t provide any value to them. (MA3, Male). Another interviewee said:
We’ve got quite good user response when we provide value to them rather than intrude upon their space. For example, virtual product placement on our site is very well received by users. Hundreds of thousands of virtual Puma-branded jackets were purchased as gifts in only two days. That was ten times more than the total non-branded virtual moon cakes sent during the week of Mid-Autumn. Product placement makes virtual gifts more appealing to users. It is essential to balance user experience against marketing activities. (CP/SP3, Male)
Overall, mobile phone and mobile Internet penetration, user sophistication with mobile technologies, and user attitudes towards mobile marketing are important dimensions in consumer readiness to influence brand owners’ adoption decisions. While the increasing mobile and mobile Internet penetration was perceived as a facilitator of mobile marketing adoption by firms, the short time users spend on mobile and the insufficient user sophistication with mobile technologies were perceived as barriers. Spamming was perceived as a very negative impact on user attitudes towards mobile marketing, which was also a barrier to brand owners’ adoption. Otherwise, users are open to mobile marketing if it is permission-based, relevant, and provides value to them. The importance of consumer attitude towards mobile marketing adoption at the firm level demonstrates the power shift between marketers and consumers.
4.3.3 Market supply
There are several key industry actors on the supply side of mobile marketing, including mobile content and service providers, advertising agencies, mobile marketing specialist agencies including mobile marketing technology and solution providers, mobile operators, and mobile phone manufacturers. They assume important roles in supplying mobile ad inventory, mobile marketing solutions, mobile networks and devices.
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While operators have a double identity both as industry player and as regulator, this section focuses more on its role of the industry player, its activities in mobile service development, and its attitude towards mobile marketing . Its impact on brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing as industry regulator will be discussed in the section on regulation (See Section 4.3.6).
Factors analysed in this section include: diversity and scale in mobile content and service market; insufficient supply and fragmented expertise of mobile marketing agencies; limited scope of mobile marketing agencies; availability of third-party monitoring service; and flexible cooperation.
Diversity and scale in mobile content and service market. The mobile content and service market in China is flourishing, with existing and new players competing in an environment of uncertainty and rapid change. Interviewees agreed that the increasing range of mobile content and service and the intensifying competition would boost mobile ad inventory, which would drive brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing. As one interviewee pointed out: “current competition among operators and device manufacturers are more in content and services than in price and functionality. This drives the development of content and service market, which in turn drives mobile marketing adoption” (BO1, Male).
Many interviewees mentioned that operators are active in developing mobile value added services to seek new revenue sources as the profits from voice and SMS are going down. While it was a concern shared by a few interviewees that operators’ “aggressive move in mobile value-added service market upset mobile SPs owing to the former’s dominant position in the industry” (MA4, Male); Others simply dismissed operators’ capability in innovative service development, which is “evidenced by its track record” and “not a big threat to SPs”(VC1, Male). The majority of interviewees perceived the increasing number of players as a driver for the whole industry rather than a threat. As one interviewee said:
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Operators have their own mobile portals and other value-added service; they are to some extent our competitors. Competition is good though, in the sense that we can together make the cake bigger. The development of mobile content and service would drive mobile marketing adoption among brand owners. (CP/SP2, Male)
Another interviewee cited the increasing competition in mobile app stores as an example: “Within-app advertising is going to be the next trend as everyone is thinking about how to make money when users are usually downloading free apps” (MA3, Male).
While mobile content and services are flourishing, with different parties playing in the field, interviewees perceived small-scale of the fragmented mobile media as a barrier. The resulting complexity and the dilemma between reach and relevancy inhibits mobile marketing adoption by brand owners.
Currently there are few successful WAP sites which can accumulate a large number of users comparable to the market leaders including traditional Internet portals’ mobile sites such as sina, baidu, and 3gqq.qq.com, and mobile portals such as wap.3g.cn and wap.tx.com.cn. No new market entrants can catch up as of yet. The lack of scale of some mobile sites creates complexity in media purchase, which leads brand owners to turn away from mobile marketing. (CP/SP6, Male)
As another interviewee pointed out: “precise targeting is good, but that does not mean they don’t want reach. Scale is very important, as always” (MA3, Male). For some mobile marketing specialist agencies, they “wouldn’t consider mobile media publishers who do not have enough reach” (MA6, Female).
What complicates the problem is the homogeneity in mobile content and services, which becomes a barrier for some brand owners in adopting mobile marketing, especially mobile advertising, owing to the lack of target market fit. The homogeneity results from the fact that most mobile content and service providers target the same user group: the large number of young users who are reportedly the main force in mobile media consumption. As one interviewee, explained,
The number of its users is a major criterion we use to measure a media publisher, therefore mobile media publishers have to focus their effort on capturing those mainstream users such as young students and migrant workers. For some brand owners, such as high–end brands, homogeneous mobile content and services
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targeting those users limit their choices in an already fragmented publisher market. (MA5, Male)
Nonetheless, some interviewees mentioned that traditional Internet service providers contribute to the diversification of the content market as they start to offer their content on mobile. One interviewee mentioned most social networking sites with games like Happy Farms as an example,
Many users are white collar professionals, and they are so into this game that they return like clockwork to water their crops or get up early in the morning to steal crops. With the release of mobile versions, a lot of people have moved onto mobile as they cannot access PC all the time. (MA4, Male)
Further, a few mobile content and service providers have begun to target less-tapped market opportunities, and develop a user base with alternative demographics, such as those with higher incomes. As one interviewee said, “At the end of the day there will be no such thing as the killer application, but many to address different users. A wider variety of user groups will help drive brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing” (VC1, Male).
The current mobile content and service market is rapidly developing, with different actors competing in this field. This will attract more mobile media users and provide more mobile media inventory, therefore facilitating brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing. The lack of scale and the accompanying fragmentation are barriers to the adoption. The homogeneity of mobile content and services resulting from the pursuit of the same target user groups also inhibits adoption as they do not find a desirable overlap between their target users and mobile content and service users. However, traditional Internet service providers and some mobile content and service providers are starting to target the under-tapped market. This helps mobile content and services to diffuse to a wider demographic, which will drive brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing.
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Insufficient supply and fragmented expertise of mobile marketing agencies. While both existing and new players are pursuing opportunities in mobile content and services, all interviewees mentioned there is an insufficient supply of mobile marketing specialist agencies or mobile marketing solution providers. Further, owing to the lack of mobile marketing agencies which can provide “one-stop service from strategic planning to execution and from media planning to creative idea” (VC2, Male), mobile marketing strategy design to execution becomes a complicated process involving multiple parties. This inhibits brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing and also discourages traditional agencies from recommending mobile marketing to their clients.
Most traditional agencies do not have a team of mobile marketing specialists who can take care of mobile marketing from beginning to end for their clients. They often need to look for a partner in SMS platform service, another in mobile Internet building, another in mobile Internet ad serving, and still another in Bluetooth campaign, or AR technology. The agency needs to work with so many vendors to deliver a campaign. That is too painful for them to recommend it to the clients. (MA3, Male)
Further, a few interviewees mentioned that some brand owners raise doubts about mobile marketing agencies with limited expertise. As mobile marketing involves a variety of technologies, some mobile marketing solution providers only have expertise in certain solutions. In such cases, some brand owners question the true purpose of the solution providers, who may leverage cooperation with the big-name brands to promote their own client software or solutions. One interviewee said, for example:
They only deliver one form of mobile marketing using image recognition technology. After completing a case for a big brand in 2007, they hoped to get more business from there. However, they proposed to every client with the same idea. Smart brand owners would question why they shall use my marketing dollars to promote the mobile client software? (MA3, Male)
Some interviewees pointed out that while some agencies claim themselves to be mobile marketing experts, what they do is merely mobile ad serving. One interviewee frankly said: “Quite a few agencies still stay at the stage of selling ad inventory, including affiliate marketing. This reduces the value of mobile for brand owners, as there is a big difference between mobile advertising and mobile marketing” (CP/SP 2, Male). When
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mobile marketing is reduced to mobile media purchase, its relative advantage is not fully brought out. As one interviewee said: “Without being exposed to the full potential of mobile marketing, brand owners may be misled and not find it a desirable option” (CP/SP2, Male).
While mobile marketing is a new revenue source for SPs, for the moment it is not their business focus. As one interviewee said: “We constantly see SPs trying to do mobile marketing for new revenue source. At the end of the day, however, they still rely much on charging users for services” (MA4, Male). Some interviewees mentioned that it is hard for SPs to increase revenue through mobile marketing because they come from a very different business. As one interviewee explained: “They don’t really understand brands; they don’t understand agencies either. They rely much on the relationships with the operators. They understand technology, but mobile marketing is not all about technology” (CP/SP7, Male). Therefore their lack of expertise in mobile marketing is a barrier to brand owners’ adoption.
Though SPs are not a major force now in driving brand owners’ adoption as mobile marketing solution providers or specialist agencies, they are early adopters of mobile marketing themselves and support the solution providers or specialist agencies who struggle to survive. Some mobile marketing solution providers and agencies mainly target mobile SPs and CPs for mobile marketing business. This is a strategy to differentiate from those who serve big brand owners across industries. For those who do not have access to those big brand owners, SPs and CPs are a good source of clients for mobile marketing owing to the target market fit. As mentioned earlier, their target consumers are those who are more adept at mobile technologies and content consumption, and who spend more time on their mobile. Therefore they are more likely to be exposed to mobile marketing more often and to interact with brand owners. Further, it is easier to communicate with SP/CP advertisers as they are in the mobile business and have more knowledge about mobile media and mobile marketing. More importantly, the media purchase based on CPS obviously appeals to SPs/CPs. Therefore they assume an important role as clients to support mobile marketing industry. However,
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as agencies who only serve SPs/CPs have limited expertise and do not promote mobile marketing to a wider client base, this inhibits mobile marketing adoption by firms in other industries.
UUCun is a typical ad network based on CPS model, targeting advertisers in mobile content and service business. According to its CEO Zhang Zhendong,
SPs/CPs come to us since we can help them to make money. Therefore we don’t even need to pitch much to these SP/CP advertisers. They often call us to ask for more advertising inventory. It’s much easier than convincing brand owners such as those traditional 4A’s clients. (MA4, Male)
However, this strategy is exposed to regulatory risks. When operators’ policy toward SPs make them hard to survive, such marketing solution providers may lose their clients and revenue source altogether. As Zhang confessed, “Recently SP/CP advertising reduces a lot because China Mobile is tightening up content regulation. It’s the time for hibernation. And we are thinking about approaching brand owners for more business” (MA4, Male).
The insufficient supply and the lack of expertise of mobile marketing agencies inhibits brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing. The complicated mobile marketing strategy design and execution process involving multiple parties is a barrier for both brand owners and agencies. Some solutions may attract brand owners owing to the novelty effect, but mobile marketing agencies or solution providers with limited expertise tend to have a hard time gaining business, especially at the early stage.
Further, those who are mainly in the mobile ad serving business limit brand owners’ understanding about mobile marketing, and inhibit brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing. While some agencies and solution providers turn to SPs/CPs for mobile marketing business, they do not drive mobile marketing beyond SP/CP clients. Only when their business with SP is under threat do they take an active approach in driving mobile marketing adoption by brand owners beyond SPs/CPs in the mobile industry.
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Availability of third-party monitoring. The lack of third-party monitoring was a barrier to firms’ adoption of mobile marketing, as this hurt performance measurement and observability.
Before the introduction of the first third-party monitoring system mWebTracker, according to several interviewees, no party was willing to invest in such a system because it would take a long time to recoup the investment owing to the small size of the mobile marketing industry. Mobile marketing solution providers and agencies used to use the system designed for Internet ad monitoring. As one interviewee revealed,
Previously we used the Internet ad monitoring system from Nielsen, and we paid 120,000 yuan a year for the service. The cost involved in developing a new system dedicated to mobile would be very high, perhaps over 10 times this price. Back then mobile advertising was too small for them to develop a new system. (MA 5, Male)
The interviewee also mentioned the problems they encountered when there was no third-party monitoring service dedicated to mobile. The Internet marketing monitoring system could not do justice to mobile marketing. As one interviewee mentioned: “Nielsen’s Internet monitoring system was only a makeshift, and that created problems.” (MA5, Male)
The interviewee revealed that, later, his agency began to use its own system, which was dedicated to mobile ad monitoring, but the biggest problem was that it was not a third-party service. The decreasing business showed the importance of a third-party monitoring system dedicated to the mobile for brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing. According to him: “Some brand owners only put in a small budget owing to the lack of the third-party monitoring” (MA5, Male).
Now, with the release of mWebTracker, the first third-party monitoring system in China, brand owners welcome such a service, especially when it is free at the initial stage. Several interviewees from agencies mentioned being approached by Nielsen to test the newly developed system at an early stage. They were quite positive about the introduction of such a system, which drove brand owners’ adoption of mobile
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marketing. As one interviewee said:
Brand owners who are our mobile ad network clients can use mWebTracker for free for the moment. They are happy to find such service, especially when it is for free. Media owners may not welcome the third-party monitoring, but when there is such kind of service, they cannot say they refuse to use it; otherwise they are saying their data is not reliable. (MA3, Male)
However, mWebTracker is still at the introduction stage. Some mobile marketing specialist agencies or solution providers said they did not use any third-party monitoring service. One interviewee mentioned: “Current performance measurement is based on our own data; the clients can also measure the performance by benchmarking, comparing the before- and after-campaign scenario. We have worked with many brands, and have gained clients’ trust” (CP/SP 7, Male). Despite that, most interviewees called for the use of a third-party monitoring service. As one interviewee said: “WAP sites should be more open-minded and adopt third-party monitoring. This will drive brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing as it will provide a better idea of media effectiveness” (TA 4, Male).
The release of a third-party monitoring service dedicated to mobile marketing facilitates brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing, especially when it is free. It enables brand owners to get a clear picture of the effectiveness of mobile marketing, and allows them to adjust their strategies accordingly in order to increase the return on investment. The service is still at the introduction stage and mobile ad networks are major drivers in adopting this service.
Flexible cooperation. Most interviewees on the supply side mentioned that they cooperate with other industry players to develop their own businesses, and promote the mobile marketing industry as a whole. Currently, drawing on various parties’ complimentary resources and expertise through cooperation is a necessity for driving brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing. Meanwhile the cooperation also facilitates integrating mobile media into the whole marketing campaign.
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As mobile marketing is still in the early stage, mobile marketing solution providers or specialist agencies are still a small force. They need to cooperate with traditional advertising agencies because the latter have the client resources and a better understanding of clients, and mobile marketing is more effective when integrated with other media. As one interviewee put it: “Traditional advertising agencies still holds brand owners’ budget. When there is a need for a mobile strategy, the agencies come to us for the mobile expertise” (CP/SP 7, Male). Another interviewee from a traditional advertising agency mentioned their expertise and the need to meet client requirements: “We have the advantage of brand insights and consumer insights to develop strategies and creative ideas, and to integrate different media. We work together with our partners on mobile marketing solutions” (TA 4, Male).
Some mobile marketing specialist agencies like Madhouse believed that mobile and traditional marketing are complementary and have, therefore, developed a close relationship with traditional agencies. Its CEO said: “We need to have a clear understanding of what our role is. Advertising agencies are still very important players in the industry. We can provide mobile marketing solutions but that does not mean we must serve brand owners directly” (MA3, Male). He also mentioned how they maintained the close relationship in their daily work, which increases efficiencies and provides a feedback channel for the mobile specialist agencies to improve their solutions.
We’ve dispatched some of our employees to work at agencies who are our close partners. They sit together with agencies teams in account, planning, and creative departments in their daily work. By working with agencies, it also enables us to understand their clients better, and improve our solutions to meet their requirement. This is more efficient as we are involved early on. (MA3, Male)
While Madhouse does not serve brand owners directly but through partnership with 4A agencies only, most of the other mobile marketing agencies or solution providers approach both brand owners and traditional agencies. Some mobile technology and service providers actually assume multiple roles. The flexible cooperation among different parties means “multiple entry points” for their businesses
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(TA4, Male) and promotes the development of the mobile marketing industry, which in turn drives brand owners’ adoption.
In some sense we are the vendor, providing technology and service; meanwhile we are also media and content providers as well. We can provide project-based services to brand owners. We can also provide agencies with our technology and service, which can be integrated into their platform or solutions. Industry participants have come to realize this trend, which enriches the ecosystem. (CP/SP6, Male)
Overall, mobile marketing specialist agencies and solution providers, technology providers, mobile content and service providers, and traditional agencies with their own expertise and resources are engaging themselves in flexible cooperation to meet their own needs and also drive the adoption of mobile marketing by brand owners.
4.3.4 Conflicts of interest among industry players
While the flexible cooperation among suppliers facilitates brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing, conflicts of interest also exist among industry players. This has a negative impact on brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing. The themes relating to the conflicts of interest among industry players are: tensions between operators and mobile service providers; tensions between operators and mobile manufacturers; tensions between operator’s agent and other agencies; and tensions between mobile marketing specialist agencies and traditional agencies.
Operators vs. mobile service providers. The conflicts of interest between operators and mobile service providers exist both in mobile marketing and mobile value-added service provision. First, interviewees agreed that mobile marketing does not assume much importance for operators as “their main business objective is to grow users of their networks” (MA6, Female). As one interviewee said: “Operators are like aircraft carriers. Currently mobile marketing is simply too small for them to spend much effort. That is where we come in” (MA6, Female). The fear of user complaint and their possible resulting migration to a competitor makes operators protective of their mobile media resources and cautious about vigorously promoting mobile marketing. They need to “keep their users happy and protect their users from too much unwanted marketing
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messages”(MA6, Female). Therefore, despite mobile marketing agencies’ hope for the operators to promote mobile marketing, operators act as gatekeepers, from certifying SP partners, to releasing data and guarding their media inventory.
The operators are trying to set hurdles for other industry players to profit from mobile marketing, especially on their ad inventory. First, it needs to be a company with an SP license. Second, some operators’ official content products such as MMS newspaper are not open for mobile marketing. As they have a KPI in terms of user complaints, they have concerns that mobile marketing in the MMS would generate complaints from users, who pay for MMS newspaper and would be annoyed at the sight of advertising there. (MA5, Male)
Operators stopped providing UA altogether at some point in the past to crack down on spamming; it was actually going a bit too far. Providing mobile numbers creates the problem of spamming, but not providing UA. UA helps in better targeting and user experience optimization, and thus promotes the value of mobile media. (MA3, Male)
Several other interviewees mentioned that they could get UA. One interviewee revealed that they have to “approach operators’ subsidiaries or partners who also need UA in their businesses” but that “raises the cost” for them (MA5, Male). Another interviewee, who asked to remain anonymous, was also quite outspoken about operators’ selective approach to releasing UA for better user experience in mobile Internet service as well as mobile marketing.
As operators need to improve user experience to promote their own mobile Internet services, they have come to realize the critical importance of optimization. Now they selectively provide UA to some mobile service providers, although not publicly, rather than keeping it together with mobile numbers to themselves. (CP/SP, anonymous)
Further, operators also rely on their “dominant position in the industry” (CP/SP6, Male) to put hurdles before service providers as they compete in the value-added services market. Many interviewees explicitly referred to China Mobile’s policy, which forced many SPs out of business. This hurts the mobile media ecology, which has am impact on brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing. As one interviewee pointed out: “Operators here want to do many things, but it’s a different business to manage mobile as media. If operators can be more open, it would help a lot to move mobile marketing
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forward” (TA4, Male).
Overall, while operators do not spend much effort in building mobile marketing businesses, they rely on their dominant position in the industry to guard the turf. This results in higher costs for other mobile marketing players and thus indirectly inhibits the adoption of mobile marketing by firms. Further, as operators compete with service providers in the mobile value-added service market, they curb the development of service providers. This hurts the mobile media ecology and inhibits brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing.
Operators vs. mobile manufacturers. Interviewees also mentioned that the delicate relationship between mobile manufacturers and operators slows down mobile marketing adoption as the two parties negotiate their interests. While both are competing against each other in the mobile content and services market, and both have entered the mobile marketing market, they rely on each other as well. One interviewee cited Nokia and China Mobile as an example: “Nokia need China Mobile to expand their market share in device market as operator subsidized devices is more competitive in device market, and China Mobile needs Nokia to enhance its competitiveness in TD-SCDMA devices” (IC1, Male).
MM-Ovi, the first co-branded app store in China, demonstrates the two parties’ co-opetition in the industry. As this is Nokia’s compromise to co-branding its app store only in China, it reflects China Mobile’s dominant position in the industry, and more so now since Nokia’s market share in China going down. While mobile manufacturers can pre-install their own services on their devices, operators also want easier access and greater discoverability on devices. As the co-branded app store is pre-installed in Nokia devices, it solves the problem. However, unresolved issues still exist, such as the revenue sharing model in MM-Ovi regarding app sales and advertising. While the two parties are cooperating with each other, tensions between the dominant operators and mobile manufacturers complicate the process of negotiating their interests in mobile marketing. As one interviewee said: “It took long before they figure out the co-branded app store
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model to balance their interests. It may take longer when it comes to mobile advertising in the store” (MA3, Male).
The conflict of interest between operators and mobile manufacturers results from the fact that both are pursuing users for their mobile value-added services and are exploring new business models, like mobile marketing. The two parties’ co-opetition involves complicated and lengthy negotiation of interests, which inhibit brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing.
Operator agency vs. other agencies. Tension also exists between China Mobile’s mobile marketing agency and other agencies. While the operators’ portal is overtaken by off-deck mobile portals in traffic, they still have a strong negotiation power owing to its official status. As one interviewee mentioned a client as an example: “They choose Monternet mainly because of the branding effect of advertising on the official site. It’s like advertising on CCTV (China Central Television)” (MA5, Male).
Relying on its exclusive partnership with China Mobile, Fractalist adopts a selective approach in terms of which clients’ cases to take. Fractalist’s sales director was quite outspoken regarding its strong negotiation power:
We would suggest advertising agencies to look for other partners if they’ve got a big budget from their clients but only gave us a tiny bit of the whole pie. We think that our advantage and mobile marketing’s advantage can justify a bigger part of the budget. (MA6, Female)
While the operator agency relies on its official portal status to be selective and demanding in client cases, the tension between it and other advertising agencies inhibits brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing.
Mobile marketing specialist agencies vs. traditional agencies. While mobile marketing specialist agencies or solution providers partner with traditional agencies, some found it not efficient to go through a go-between, especially when traditional agencies do not have enough knowledge or motivation to adopt mobile marketing.
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It turns out that it’s the most effective if we communicate with brand owners directly. For the moment, we need to educate both, and that is more work than communicating with agencies alone. If only they could be a good in-between. (MA6, Female)
Therefore the tensions and inefficient cooperation between mobile marketing specialist agencies and traditional agencies inhibit brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing.
Various players with different resources, expertise and agenda cause inefficiency in the communication and negotiation of interests. As the dominant power in the industry, operators’ attitudes towards mobile marketing is more about guarding territory than keeping clear of mobile marketing, though they are cautious about consumer complaints. Operators’ move in value-added service development, given their dominant position, has forced many SPs out of business, which weakens the link of the industry and impacts on mobile marketing adoption as well. As operators and mobile manufacturers both have ambitions for the mobile value-added service market and have an eye for mobile marketing opportunities, the negotiation of interests between the two parties is complex and takes time. This also impacts on brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing. Moreover, the selective approach adopted by operator’s exclusive partner towards mobile media and client inhibits brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing. While traditional 4A agencies have client resources and a well-established understanding of their client, the lack of expertise in mobile marketing results in inefficient collaboration with mobile marketing specialist agencies, and becomes a barrier to brand owners’ mobile marketing adoption.
4.3.5 Market education
Most interviewees reported that mobile marketing agencies and solution providers are the main force in educating both brand owners and traditional agencies. This drives brand owners’ adoption. As more and more brand owners are aware of mobile marketing, they turn to their agencies for more knowledge and feasible proposals. Therefore it is important for agencies to have enough expertise and resources to
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respond to their clients, which influences the decisions of brand owners. Under such pressure, agencies often turn to mobile marketing solution providers or specialist agencies, which play an important role in market education. As one interviewee from mobile marketing specialist agencies mentioned: “Every new medium needs to go through the stage of market education. We have been educating brand owners and agencies through workshops, seminars and demos. This is an effective way of developing business as well” (MA3, Male).
Another interviewee from a traditional agency mentioned the pressure they receive from their clients and shared how they have actively engaged mobile marketing specialist agencies and solution providers in knowledge sharing.
A lot of clients are thinking how to leverage mobile media. If we as agency cannot deliver what they want to know about it, they can easily go somewhere else. So we need to work very hard to keep our clients...We have regularly invited mobile marketing specialist agencies and solution providers over to share knowledge and experience with us and our clients at workshop and seminars. (TA2, Female)
Interviewees also mentioned the importance of changing a client’s mindset, showing them the particularities of the mobile, and, going further than demonstrations by showing clients the feasibility, or the scalability, of the creative idea.
We need to let them know what’s different on mobile, what’s unique about it, in terms of its role in the whole marketing campaign, and the metrics. Brand owners who know more about mobile marketing are more likely to adopt it. (TA1, Male)
It is important for brand owners to think more in terms of relevancy than reach in terms of mobile media. Once brand owners think in a different way, mobile marketing are more likely to find its place in their budget. (BO1, Male)
We also let them know if the creative idea is executable; how long it would take for technical development; what results they would get in terms of scale, etc. Sometimes the client would find some demo very interesting, and we would remind them that it can only be done on several mobile models to deliver the effect they see. (MA3, Male)
However, not everyone wants to be a market educator. Some mobile marketing specialist agencies or solution providers only approach brand owners to identify those
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who are interested in mobile marketing instead of spending effort pitching their ideas. As one interviewee said: “We don’t want to keep following up with those who don’t have any intention of adopting mobile marketing; otherwise sales cycle is too long for us. The market needs to be educated, but we don’t want to be the educator” (MA2, Male). This reduces the opportunity for a wider population of brand owners to be exposed to the opportunities of mobile marketing and inhibits their adoption.
Although a small force, mobile marketing specialist agencies and solution providers assume the important role of the market educator to drive mobile marketing adoption in various ways. By sharing their knowledge and experience, they raise the awareness and understanding of mobile marketing among traditional advertising agencies and brand owners. Meanwhile, traditional advertising agencies also feel pressure from their clients to learn more about mobile marketing. It should also be noted that some mobile marketing agencies or solution providers see a short sales cycle as their priority, therefore not committing themselves as much to market education.
4.3.6 Regulatory environment
Themes relating to the regulatory environment emerging from the interviews are: investment in network infrastructure and network convergence; promotion of a healthy industry environment; lack of legislation and regulatory loopholes; lack of a dedicated and independent regulatory body; fragmented and confusing operator policies; regulations in tightening up traditional advertising.
Investment in network infrastructure and network convergence. Many interviewees mentioned the positive impact of the launch of 3G and the industry restructuring on mobile marketing adoption, although that hasn’t happened in an overt way yet. While it “does not make much different for the moment”, brand owners are “more aware of mobile marketing” (CP/SP2, Male). They believed that the enhanced competition in mobile content and service markets as well as among operators would drive user growth and firms’ mobile marketing adoption. As one interviewee put it:
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“More competition after the restructuring will drive the development of the whole industry. It is predictable that the number of mobile Internet users will increase, user experience will improve and brand owners will have more confidence in mobile marketing (MA3, Male)”.
The convergence of TV broadcasting, Internet and telecom networks is believed to drive firms’ mobile marketing adoption as well. Many interviewees mentioned new opportunities in mobile TV or mobile video advertising. Some brand owners and agencies have already started to look at the new opportunities and the associated challenges, for example, how to measure the performance of different screens when convergence is realized (MA3, Male).
Promotion of a healthy industry environment. Interviewees agreed that the promotion of a healthy mobile content and service market promotes the value of mobile media and marketing, and accelerates the transformation of business models of the WAP sites and ad networks, which leads to more supplier promotion. Therefore regulations promoting a healthy industry environment drive brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing.
Spamming was repeatedly mentioned as a negative influence on the industry, since it “sends off wrong signals to brand owners about what is mobile marketing, and inhibit their adoption of true mobile marketing” (MA3, Male). Some brand owners believed that spammers have “spoilt the soup”, and “do not want to be associated with them” (BO3, Male). The crackdown on spamming was believed to be good for the whole industry and will “lead brand owners to understand and adopt true mobile marketing” (CP/SP7, Male).
When asked about the impact of operator regulation of mobile content and services on mobile marketing adoption, some interviewees expressed concern that the pendulum may swing too far. Most interviewees, however, agreed that it helps to promote the value of mobile media and drives the adoption of mobile marketing. As one interviewee pointed out: When the number of those WAP sites with improper
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content decreases, the value of good WAP sites goes up. It’s good for us, and for the whole industry” (MA3, Male). Another interviewee gave an example: “The traffic of Nokia.mobi doubled since China Mobile stopped providing billing service to all WAP sites owing to the widespread spamming practices” (BO1, Male).
Some interviewees pointed out that the clamp down on WAP sites also pushes them to consider other business models, such as mobile marketing, rather than relying on charging users alone. In the past, it was easy for SPs to charge users through operators’ billing channels and very few considered mobile marketing as a major revenue source. However, when China Mobile suspended the billing service to WAP sites, it challenged the business model of many SPs/CPs. As one interviewee said: “Publishers should be able to do business based on two business models: user payment and advertising. Now, China Mobile’s suspension of billing service makes it impossible to charge users. Mobile marketing would become an important revenue source for them”.(MA3, Male). Further, many ad networks targeting mainly SPs/CPs also began to consider expanding their business to serve brand owners beyond SPs/CPs. As one interviewee revealed: “If almost 70-80% of WAP sites are gone, how are we going to survive? Policy risks are very high here. We’re planning to get more clients from other industries instead of relying on SPs/CPs alone next year” (MA4, Male). Therefore the transformation of business models of the WAP sites and ad networks which lead to more supplier promotion was believed to drive brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing.
Lack of legislation and regulatory loopholes. Most interviewees mentioned the lack of legislation as a regulatory weakness that inhibits the effort of building a healthy industry environment, and impacts mobile marketing adoption. Currently there is no specific anti-spam legislation in China. The government only issues administrative documents and notices that, largely, relies on operators to execute them. As one interviewee said: “The government shows its stand on issues such as spamming and SPs’ malpractice, but there needs to be concrete standards and actions; otherwise it’s sometimes loose, sometimes tight” (MA4, Male). Another interviewee cited the
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regulation on spamming as an example:
While monitoring and screening services are available for spam messages, spammers can easily get around them by changing phone cards. Although a new national law requires buyers to present identification to purchase phone cards, it is not implemented strictly, especially considering the large amount of street vendors and telephone booths selling phone cards in China (Duan & Li, 2011).
Despite government regulations, it is “hard to eradicate spamming without proper legislation” (IC1, Male). While some interviewees claimed they do not spam as it does not show the true value of mobile marketing and goes against the government regulation, other interviewees mentioned that some companies have to do it for survival. As one interviewee said: “It’s an easy business, and it keeps those companies alive before the day of mobile marketing really arrives” (MA3, Male).
For those who honour consumer consent, however, what constitutes consent is a grey area. Some interviewees pointed out that getting consumer consent is “more complicated than getting one-off permission” (MA3, Male) to receive mobile marketing messages in practice. Frequency caps are also important to avoid annoying consumers. As one interviewee said: “If the ad serving platform is not intelligent enough, for example, it cannot set caps on how many times a user can see the ad within a period, then it may drive people crazy” (MA3, Male). If people lose trust in mobile marketing they may not opt in somewhere in future. For marketers, it will be an uphill battle to rebuild consumer trust once they lose it.
Some interviewees mentioned the Regulations on Management of Customized Handsets (MIIT, 2010) as another example of weak regulation. MIIT released it in April 2010, urging operators to strengthen their monitoring of pre-installed services on operator-customized devices to combat SP malpractice associated with pre-installation. Specifically, the customized handsets were not allowed not be pre-installed with hard-coded mobile SP codes, links to SP services or client software from SPs. However, the regulation was perceived as a weak solution to SP malpractice in terms of pre-installation since most of the malpractice is found on non-operator-customized
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mobiles. As one interviewee pointed out: “As operator-customized handsets are most often pre-installed with operators’ value added services instead of SP products, the regulation does not hit the core of the problem” (MA4, Male). Further, there is still “a void to be filled” regarding regulations targeting at the cases where “SPs work together with Shanzhai mobile makers without going through operators in setting up traps for SP product consumption” (CP/SP6, Male).
Lack of a dedicated and independent regulatory body. Most interviewees pointed out that the lack of a dedicated regulatory body resulted in ineffective regulation as the operators played the sport and acted as referee at the same time. With their own interests involved, operators simply cannot be objective in industry regulation. Lack of a dedicated and independent regulatory body was perceived as a hurdle in building a healthy industry environment for mobile marketing adoption.
Spamming is a case in point. Currently, mobile phone users who are irritated by spam messages can file complaints with their operators by forwarding the spam to a service number, and the operators will track the originating number and how many messages it has sent For the few users who make the effort, they can expect no feedback about the investigation (Duan & Li, 2011). As one interviewee mentioned: Many SPs went out of business as a result of operators’ fight against their malpractice. However, the problem still exists and consumer complaints never end. We cannot rely on operators only” (MA4, Male). Another interviewee held the same view: “Operators also benefit from the network usage and cannot act as a real regulator” (VC1, Male).
While the triple network convergence promises more opportunities of mobile marketing, most interviewees pointed out that “the absence of a proper regulatory body is a stumbling block ahead” (CP/SP5, Female). As one interviewee said: “Broadcasting and Internet industries are both trying to dominate in the convergence process, and the process could be slow, just as in the case where it took so many years for the government to release the plan” (MA3, Male). The tug of war among different government bodies governing separate industries, and the lack of an independent
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regulatory body overseeing all parties slows down the convergence process. That also has a negative impact on firms’ adoption of mobile marketing.
Fragmented and confusing operator policies. Many interviewees mentioned the fragmented and confusing operator policies as barriers to mobile marketing adoption. They also pointed out that the lack of standards among operators’ different provincial management reduces the feasibility of certain forms of mobile marketing, and hurts scalability as well. Different SP management practices among three operators were also found to complicate the procedure and raise the cost for brand owners.
If a marketing campaign needs to cover a certain market segment, 80% of whom are China Mobile users, 20% are China Union users and the rest 10% are China Telecom users, brand owners need three SPs to cooperate with them or they have to apply for three service codes in case of using one SP. This increases the complexity and cost in execution. (CP/SP6, Male)
Another oft-mentioned example is China Mobile’s two different access points of its GPRS network, CMNET and CMWAP. This is in contrast to other countries where there is only one access point to the GPRS network. The former targets PC or notebook users, and the latter targets mobile users. While the former can access the Internet without any limit, the latter can only access a limited version of the Internet, through WAP and HTTP protocols. In mobile marketing, SPs can only get a billing channel through CMWAP. China Mobile gives some discount in traffic plans for access through CMWAP, but not CMNET. The differentiated charging standards inhibited mobile Internet adoption among users, which is a dimension of consumer readiness for mobile marketing, as discussed earlier (Section 4.3.2). As one interviewee said,
Very few users have such knowledge, and they can only be surprised at the sight of the bills if they have not set up the right access mode, especially when many China Mobile customized mobiles do not have prompts for users to choose. This is a big hurdle for mobile Internet adoption. Since operators started to remove the difference in traffic plans for the two access points3, mobile Internet usage has increased, and this will drive brand owners’ mobile marketing adoption. (CP/SP3)
3 As part of the operator’s plan to remove the differentiation between the two charging standards, Shanghai Mobile started not to differentiate CMNET and CMWAP in traffic plans in 2007, and Guangzhou Mobile started to do so in December 2009.
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Regulations in tightening up traditional advertising. In addition to regulatory actions by MIIT in the telecom industry, policies in traditional media industries also affect mobile marketing adoption. Quite a few interviewees referred to Administrative Measures for the Broadcasting of Radio and TV Advertisements (No.61 Decree) issued by SARFT. The Decree, which became effective as of January 1, 2010, restricts the times and length of advertisements during radio and television programs. To reduce their loss in revenue because of the squeezed commercials, which is estimated at 10 billion RMB, provincial satellite television stations raised the quotation for advertising, by an average of 20% (Z. Zhao, 2009). Most interviewees pointed out that this influenced brand owners’ budget planning for 2010, and drove brand owners to adopt new media, including mobile marketing. As one interviewee said, “This is an opportunity of mobile media, as brand owners are considering moving some of TV commercial budget to somewhere else, including mobile” (CP/SP 5, Female).
4.4 Discussions
Based on the findings, Table 8 presents a revised framework of factors influencing brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing. This section provides discussions of the findings.
The findings show that mobile marketing technologies are perceived as having relative advantages over traditional media: including the targeting capability, access to data about real users; immediate call-to-action capability; cost efficiency and the opportunity to deliver fresh consumer experience.
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TABLE 8 Revised Framework of Factors Influencing Firms’ Mobile Marketing Adoption Context Influential factors Relative advantage Targeting capability Access to data about real users Immediate call-to-action Cost efficiency Fresh consumer experience Complexity The diversity of mobile marketing technologies and forms Fragmentation of devices and operating systems Technological Observability Context Mobile’s observability Mobile’s observability against other media Perceived barriers Network speed Limited visual impact Compatibility with traditional media with the Internet and broadcasting networks with existing marketing practice Innovation orientation Target market fit Organizational Organizational readiness Human resources Context Financial resources Top management support Firm size Competitive pressure Consumer readiness Penetration of mobile phone and mobile Internet User sophistication User attitudes towards mobile marketing Market supply Diversity and scale in mobile content and service market Insufficient supply and fragmented expertise of mobile marketing agencies Availability of third-party monitoring Flexible cooperation Environmental Conflicts of interest among industry players Context Operators vs. mobile service providers Operators vs. mobile manufacturers Operator agency vs. other agencies. Mobile marketing specialist agencies vs. traditional agencies Market education Regulatory environment Investment in network infrastructure and network convergence Promotion of a healthy industry environment Lack of legislation and regulatory loopholes Lack of a dedicated and independent regulatory body Fragmented and confusing operator policies Regulations in tightening up traditional advertising
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4.4.1 Technological Context
The much touted relative advantage, however, was not found to be a significant factor. For example, while the targeting capability is one of the best known relative advantages of mobile marketing, some firms fail to adopt mobile marketing for fear of alienating their consumers as a result of violating their privacy. Operators’ control over user data and the tensions in the industry reduce the appeal of access to data about real users, as brand owners may not get the data. The response rate in call-to-action campaigns depends on the campaign design, which needs to consider users’ context and media usage habit. The relative advantage of cost efficiency hinges on other factors such as easy opt-in and friendly user experience to realize the potential. Meanwhile, the complexity in the device market adds cost. The opportunity of delivering fresh consumer experience may lose its appeal as the novelty effect will not stay over time. The creative idea will become more important than technologies, as with more traditional media.
Previous research supported the findings regarding the influence of relative advantage on innovation adoption. In their meta-analysis of innovation adoption research, Tornatzky and Klein (1982, p. 435) found that not all of the studies reported that relative advantage of an innovation was absolutely significantly relevant to its adoption. In this research, interviewees recognized the relative advantages. However, the fact that relative advantages hinge on other factors, including environmental factors, reduce their appeal. Further, some brand owners do not have a complete understanding of mobile marketing, and, in some cases, have a misunderstanding as a result of some environmental factors. One example is the equation of mobile marketing and spamming which owes a lot to malpractice.
Complexity has a significantly negative influence on firms’ mobile marketing adoption. While the mobile phone is perceived to be a versatile tool, the diversity of mobile marketing technologies and forms, and the fragmentation of devices and operating systems, pose challenges for adoption. Brand owners who see mobile marketing as a complex process in planning, execution, and monitoring are less likely to adopt it.
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Observability drives mobile marketing adoption, as the result can be measured by actions or sales, which gives marketers a clear idea of the impact on consumers. All forms of mobile marketing, however, are not equally observable. The more observable the result, the more likely brand owners will be in adopting that form of mobile marketing. This also explains why virtual product sellers, like SPs, are major adopters of mobile marketing, especially the CPS model, which links mobile media’s effectiveness to sales. Further, cross-media comparisons increase observability and give brand owners a clearer view of mobile media’s effectiveness against other media, and drives mobile marketing adoption. Brand owners, however, need to be educated about the relative advantage of mobile marketing in terms of relevancy than reach. Market education in the environmental context assumes an important role here.
Perceived barriers in the technological context include network speed and limited visual impacts. Interviewees, however, had faith in technological improvement over time, and only saw the challenges playing a temporary role in mobile marketing adoption. When some technological limits are lifted, however, a gap still exists between technological possibilities and their application in mobile marketing. For example, while mobile video becomes possible with the improvement in bandwidth, different actors still need to negotiate their interests in the new form of mobile marketing.
Compatibility was found to have a positive effect on firms’ adoption of mobile marketing. Owing to its ubiquity, multi-functionality and interactive nature, mobile marketing was seen as not only fitting well with other media but also enhancing the overall marketing campaign. The tri-network convergence is a push towards mobile marketing adoption. Challenges, however, exist in delivering optimal user experience and measuring the performance of each media, not to mention the network convergence itself is a complicated process with different actors negotiating self-interests. The compatibility with existing marketing practice motivates brand owners to adopt mobile marketing.
Overall, the findings suggest that relative advantage does not have a significant influence on firms’ adoption decisions; complexity and perceived barrier has a significantly negative impact on the decisions; observability, and compatibility with other media and existing marketing practice also drives adoption of mobile marketing. While some technological issues are believed to improve over time, some issues still require different actors in the industry to join forces to address the matter. 121
4.4.2 Organizational Context
In organizational context, it is not surprising that innovation-oriented organizations are found to be more likely to adopt mobile marketing, especially at an early stage. Less innovation-oriented firms are more cautious and prefer to wait for more validation.
Target market fit was perceived to be a significant driver of brand owners’ mobile marketing adoption. Some products are perceived to provide a better fit with mobile marketing in terms of product nature, or target consumer demographics, and brand owners in these categories are more likely to adopt mobile marketing, especially at an early stage. While previous research found that consumer adoption influences firms’ adoption of mobile marketing (Shankar, et al., 2010), it is worth pointing out the importance of the target market fit in driving adoption. This also explains why some industries are earlier adopters than others. More brand owners will find the mobile a good platform to reach and engage their target consumers with the growing diffusion of mobile Internet among users.
Organizational readiness in terms of human and financial resources has a positive impact on firms’ mobile marketing adoption. As marketing managers and directors are decision makers, those who have more knowledge about mobile marketing and are more willing to learn and adapt to the change, are more likely to adopt mobile marketing. The individual adoption of mobile media among marketing management has a great influence on organizational adoption. This provides empirical support for previous research findings that the lack of mobile lifestyle within organizations is a challenge to mobile marketing adoption (Shankar, et al., 2010).
Financial resources were perceived by most interviewees to be a barrier to mobile marketing adoption. Brand owners tend to choose traditional media over mobile when the budget is tight. Some brand owners are pushed to seek more return on investment and therefore adopt mobile marketing only when convinced of its cost-effectiveness, they have to squeeze the budget for mobile marketing from elsewhere.
Top management support was perceived to be a less critical factor, as the adoption decisions are often dependent on mid-level marketing managers or directors, and top management generally has less knowledge about mobile marketing.
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Firm size was repeatedly found to influence the propensity to adopt innovation, and, in most cases, was a positive influence (Frambach & Schillewaert, 2002). In this research, firm size was found to be related to a more advanced marketing mindset and practice, facilitating mobile marketing adoption. While mobile media can be democratizing technologies for smaller firms, it is not about technology per se. The lack of a proper understanding of the technology and its role in marketing, as well as mature marketing management, has a negative impact on mobile marketing adoption by smaller firms. This is not surprising in China where small firms lack a mature marketing mindset and practice, as marketing only has a short history in the country (Ciochetto, 2005). Further, small firms’ overemphasis on quick conversion to sales lead some firms to resort to spamming, which reveals their misunderstanding of mobile marketing. Their spamming practices influence other brand owners, who may not adopt mobile marketing for fear of being associated with spammers, or they resort to spamming themselves for fear of losing consumer attention, which further pollutes the whole mobile marketing industry.
4.4.3 Environmental Context
Factors in the environmental context were found to play a key role in the adoption decision. Not surprisingly, competitive pressure was found to be an environmental stimulator. This is consistent with the previous findings (Gatignon & Robertson, 1989; Shankar, et al., 2010). On the one hand, firms are more open to the idea of mobile marketing when their competitors are either examining the feasibility or have adopted it. This supports Swilley’s finding that mimetic pressures arising out of the perceived competitor adoption drive firms’ adoption of mobile marketing. On the other hand, this research has found that firms are driven to adopt mobile marketing to offer a fresh brand experience to their target consumers, and differentiate from their competitors.
Consumer readiness in terms of penetration of mobile phone and mobile Internet emerged as a key driver of firms’ mobile marketing adoption. The growing number of mobile Internet users and the structural change of the mobile Internet user demographics drive firms’ mobile marketing adoption. The short time spent on the mobile media as a result of non-transparent and complicated data charges, as well as the culture of idle time in mobile media usage, are still barriers for firms’ adoption. The lack of user sophistication was also perceived as a hurdle for brand owners’ adoption of
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mobile marketing. Spamming was perceived as a very negative impact on user attitudes towards mobile marketing, which was also a barrier to brand owners’ adoption. Previous research (e.g., Okazaki & Taylor, 2008; Wilken & Sinclair, 2009b) also found user resistance as being responsible for the evident reluctance to fully exploit mobile marketing. Users are open to mobile marketing if it is permission-based, relevant, and provides value. The importance of consumer readiness for mobile marketing adoption at firm level is a manifestation of the power shift between marketers and consumers.
Market supply has a significant impact on firms’ adoption decision. This includes mobile content and service, mobile marketing agencies and solution providers, the third-party monitoring service, and flexible cooperation among industry actors.
While the rapidly developing mobile content and service market, with different parties playing in the field, drives firms’ mobile marketing adoption, lack of scale and the accompanying fragmentation were perceived to be barriers owing to the resulting Complexity, and the dilemma between reach and relevancy. With an increasing user base of various mobile content and services this dilemma will gradually dissolve. The emergence of ad networks, to some extent, alleviates the problem by aggregating mobile media publishers and providing intelligent targeting. The homogeneity of mobile content and services resulting from the pursuit of the same target users, the reportedly major force in mobile media consumption, inhibits mobile marketing adoption by firms as they cannot find a desirable overlap between their target users and the mobile content and service users. As traditional Internet service providers and some mobile content and service providers are starting to target less-tapped markets, mobile content and services may diffuse to a wider demographic, which will drive brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing.
The insufficient supply and fragmented expertise of mobile marketing agencies and solution providers were perceived as barriers for firms in adopting mobile marketing. The complicated mobile marketing strategy design and execution process involving multiple parties is a barrier for both brand owners and agencies. Many emergent mobile marketing agencies or solution providers with limited expertise have had a difficult time promoting themselves, especially at the early stages of market development. Further, the limited expertise of some solution providers also gives firms a limited understanding of mobile marketing, which is a barrier to adoption. While SPs find new revenue sources in mobile marketing, their business focus and expertise does 124
not allow them to drive mobile marketing adoption by brand owners beyond the mobile industry. Only when their business with SPs is under threat do they take an active approach in driving mobile marketing adoption beyond the mobile industry.
The third-party monitoring service dedicated to mobile marketing was perceived as important for driving adoption. It enhances observability of mobile marketing, which was identified by Rogers (2003) as a positive technological factor in innovation adoption. The third-party monitoring service enables firms to have a clear idea of the performance of mobile marketing and to adjust their strategies for a better return on investment.
The multiple roles of both new and existing actors and their interdependencies in the mobile marketing business lead to flexible cooperation, which drives adoption This supports the previous findings that owing to the technological and market uncertainty related to innovations, a mixture of both new and established companies in an emerging network enable faster and more effective value creation than in those cases where only established, or relatively new, companies are exclusively involved in the value creating process (Möller & Svahn, 2003; Salo, Sinisalo, & Karjaluoto, 2008). Meanwhile the cooperation between traditional agencies and mobile specialist agencies or solution providers also facilitates integrating mobile into the whole marketing campaign. The flexible cooperation provides a feedback channel for mobile marketing specialist agencies to improve their solutions to address brand owners’ and traditional advertising agencies’ concerns and requirements. This provides support for the argument that a company’s competencies are developed through being embedded in several networks and interacting with other companies and organizations (Awuah, 2001).
However, various actors with different agendas, expertise and resources cause conflicts of interest, and this is an obstacle for firms’ adoption of mobile marketing. This is evidenced in tensions between operators and mobile service providers; between operators and mobile manufacturers; between operator agencies and other agencies; and between mobile marketing specialist agencies and traditional agencies. The dominant position of operators in the industry has a significant impact. As the dominant power in the industry, operators’ attitude towards mobile marketing is more about guarding their own territory than keeping clear of mobile marketing, though they are cautious about consumer complaints. The move by operators into value-added service development gives rise to the conflicts of interests with SPs and mobile device manufacturers. The 125
demise of many SPs weakens the links in the industry and impacts on mobile marketing adoption. The negotiation of interests with mobile manufacturers takes time and is a complex business. The selective approach adopted by operator’s exclusive partner towards mobile media and the client also inhibits brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing. Moreover, inefficient communication between traditional agencies and mobile marketing specialist agencies is a further barrier.
Market education was perceived as having a positive impact on firms’ adoption decision, but has not been examined in previous literature. Mobile marketing agencies and solution providers play a significant role in raising the awareness and understanding of mobile marketing, not only for brand owners, but also for traditional agencies. It should be noted that the pursuit of quick sales has stopped some mobile ad networks from committing resources to educating the market.
Regarding the regulatory environment, investment in network infrastructure and network convergence, and promotion of a healthy industry environment have a positive influence on firms’ adoption of mobile marketing. The infrastructure investment leads to technological improvement and market competition, and new forms of mobile marketing. While Okazaki (2005) did not find regulatory control regarding spamming a significant predictor, he did emphasize that privacy is a serious issue to be further examined. This study has shown that such regulations play an important role in driving mobile marketing adoption. The clamp down on spamming, and the content and service regulations promotes the value of mobile media, forces some SPs to turn to the mobile marketing business, and rectifies firms’ misunderstanding of mobile marketing.
However, the lack of legislation and the regulatory loopholes, the lack of a dedicated and independent regulatory body, as well as fragmented and confusing operator policies has led to regulatory and operational inefficiencies and has inhibited firms’ mobile marketing adoption decision. Meanwhile, the regulation in tightening up traditional advertising has made way for mobile marketing adoption. While Swilley (2007) found that coercive pressure from the government drives mobile commerce adoption, government regulation in China is more about technological infrastructure and standards, spamming practices, and advertising than it is about incentive policies towards mobile marketing.
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4.4.4 Conclusion
Overall, the findings of Study One show several dimensions of dynamics. Firstly, the dynamics in the three contexts shows the significance of the environmental context. The improvement of certain aspects in one context needs other factors in the environmental context to follow to drive adoption. For example, while 3G comes with faster network speed, brand owners still find network speed a constraint to mobile marketing adoption as most users are still using the 2G and 2.5G network. Higher-speed technologies alone do not drive the adoption of mobile marketing, which also requires consumer adoption, to say the least. By the same token, it requires the readiness of various environmental factors to bring out the technological promise including relative advantages, compatibility with existing technologies and practice; and address technological obstacles such as complexity, observability, and perceived barrier. As industry actors take on multiple roles, they negotiate their interests while pushing forward mobile marketing adoption, though some environmental factors slow down the process. Further, some environmental factors also influence organizational factors. For example, increasing consumer readiness, evidenced by wider diffusion of mobile device and Internet services, improves target market fit.
Secondly, individual adoption influences organizational adoption. Marketing managers who are mobile media adopters are more likely to adopt mobile marketing in their organizations. This supports a previous research on mobile marketing adoption in the retailing industry (Shankar, et al., 2010) which found the lack of mobile lifestyle within organizations inhibits brand owners’ mobile marketing adoption.
Thirdly, network externalities are also identified in the adoption process. Network externalities, or critical mass, are seen as necessary for interactive information technologies to succeed (M. L. Katz & Shapiro, 1986; Markus, 1987). Positive network externalities exist when the intrinsic utility of an innovation increases when a firm's suppliers, customers, competitors, or other organizations also adopt the innovation (Frambach & Schillewaert, 2002). The findings of this research support this argument. For example, more adopters push the development of industry standards, such as in third-party monitoring, which in turn promotes the adoption process. Another example is that the lack of mobile marketing specialist agencies inhibits brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing. Some mobile marketing specialist agencies focus on clients in the
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mobile industry and spend less effort in driving the adoption of mobile marketing by firms in other industries. Further, consumer adoption of mobile media was perceived as a strong stimulator for adoption by firms, which was evidenced by the emphasis on target market fit in the organizational context, and consumer readiness in the environmental context.
Based on the above analysis, Figure 3 presents a revised model of the TOE framework for brand owners’ mobile marketing adoption. It demonstrates the relative importance of the environmental context and its impact on the technological and the organizational context. The improvement of certain aspects in environmental factors facilitates readiness in the technological and organizational contexts. Meanwhile, some factors in the technological and organizational contexts require factors in the environmental context to follow to drive adoption.
Competitive pressure Consumer readiness Market supply Conflicts of interest among industry players Market education regulatory environment
Environmental Context
Mobile Marketing Adoption Decision
Relative advantage Innovation orientation Complexity Target market fit Complexity Organizational readiness Perceived barriers Top management support Observability Firm size Technological Context Organizational Context
FIGURE 3 A model of firms’ adoption of mobile marketing in China. 128
This research also advances the literature by examining the impact of the industry network and regulatory environment on mobile marketing adoption in China. As industry actors negotiate their interests in the changing media landscape, they constitute the environmental context which exerts significant impact on mobile marketing adoption by firms, both directly and indirectly. Wilken and Sinclair (2009b, p. 431) argued that the conflict amongst stakeholders is, in major respects, a by-product of conflict between the industry and its consumers, or what different stakeholders want of them. While this is true, this research shows that the conflict is also about how different actors on the supply side try to take a foothold in mobile marketing and pursue direct access to consumers. This is especially true with mobile operators, whose dominant position in the industry complicates the problem. This, together with regulatory inefficiencies and loopholes, negatively impacts firms’ adoption of mobile marketing.
While Wilken and Sinclair (2009b) focused on conflicts among the mobile ecosystem, this research has gone further by examining the interdependencies and flexible cooperation among different actors. It also shows mobile marketing specialist agencies warrant a separate focus as their agenda and resources, and hence their roles in influencing firms’ adoption of mobile marketing, are different from traditional agencies.
The findings of this research also show that the significance of some factors change during the trajectory of mobile marketing adoption. Some barriers are lifted, and some relative advantages lose their validity over time. For brand owners to seize mobile marketing opportunities, it is important to keep track of technological developments, and to change their mindset when assessing its value.
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Chapter 5 Nokia E63 Campaign
Study Two examines five case studies on consumer brands’ adoption and implementation of mobile media in marketing to address RQ2: How and to what effect do firms use mobile media in marketing campaigns to facilitate co-creation brand experiences to cater to Chinese consumers’ desires for individuality and social interaction?
Chapter 5 to Chapter 9 examines five case studies, which are located in the four quadrants of the Matrix shown in Figure 2 in Chapter 3. The role of mobile media in the cases are analysed along three dimensions: the role of the mobile in content generation and consumption, the centrality of mobile media as text, tools or platforms; and the interactive environment. The factors influencing the adoption of mobile marketing in these cases are also discussed in order to further examine the findings emerging in Study One.
This chapter examines the case of the Nokia E63 campaign, a customized reading experience in 2009. By leveraging the emerging grass-roots writers in online literature market to pen the corporate narrative, this campaign delivered individual brand experience based on corporate generated content. The mobile largely assumed a supplementary role in content delivery and as a customization tool in the virtual space. The case fits into quadrant 1 of the matrix shown in Figure 2. Environment Virtual Space Hybrid Space
Centrality of mobile Supplementary role Central role media Content CGC Supplementary content Central narrative device & delivery/customization tool tool in content (individual consumption experience) Nokia E63 Campaign 1 Nokia Supernova Campaign 2
UGC Supplementary tool & Central tool & platform in platform for content location-based experience (communal presumption experience) Clean & Clear Clear Fairness TNF Virtual Red Flag Campaign 3 Nokia Fusion Challenge 4 FIGURE 2 Matrix of mobile-mediated co-creation brand experiences.
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5.1 Introduction
Since the launch of 3G services in 2009, 155 million users in China have accessed the internet via their mobiles by the first half of 2009, accounting for 46% of total users and representing an increase of 32.1% in half a year (CNNIC, 2009a). The strong growth in the mobile user population is accompanied by an increased acceptance of certain mobile internet services, among which mobile novels have gained increasing popularity. Mobile novel readers accounted for 27.7% of mobile internet users by the end of 2008, standing in second place to mobile newspapers, which garner almost 40% of mobile internet users (CNNIC, 2008). Existing research shows that online literature is finding a promising market in Asian countries, especially in Japan, Korea and China (Vasileiou, Hartley, & Rowley, 2009). This can be attributed to a variety of socio-cultural factors, such as the long public-transportation commutes in these countries.
Owing to its portability, the mobile enables people to read whenever and wherever they want. Mobile novels not only provide a new reading experience, but also facilitate an alternative publishing outlet, which promotes the development of amateur writers, who move along the reading-writing continuum, with some becoming professional writers. Online literature has already become a force of creative destruction in China’s publishing industry, which has to see an extended life line in digital publishing (E. J. Zhao, 2011).
For example, the leading online literature site qidian.com saw its origin in a site started by a group of fantasy novel fans in 2001 to publish and read original works, to market original literature, and to share reviews and comments. It staged a comeback for fantasy novels, among them a well-known 16th century classic the Journey to the West (XiYou Ji) and a 17th century classic Strange Tales of a Lonely Studio (Liaozhai Zhiyi). The business model of user subscription blazed a trail in the online literature market, which had implications for the online video market as well. As a grass-root initiative, the site was so successful that it was acquired in 2004 by Shanda Interactive Entertainment Ltd. (Nasdaq: SNDA), the leading interactive entertainment media company in China, which offers a diversified portfolio of entertainment content, including some of the most popular massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs) and casual online games. Through the acquisition of leading literature sites and copyright operation, Shanda established itself as the leader in the online literature market in China. It
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demonstrated the co-evolving dynamics between market and non-market. As the internet in China is dominated by mobile access, mobile literature witnessed growing consumption. Shanda has already entered the mobile literature market by launching mobile sites, mobile reading application Shanda Shutong in 2009, and the e-reader Bambook in 2010.
Apart from its impact on the publishing industry, the culture of mobile literature has also been taken up by marketers. The following section examines the Nokia E63 campaign in 2008, where corporate interests leveraged grass-roots creativity to engage potential consumers and facilitated the co-creation experience through a branching novel.
5.2 Campaign Background
From a riverside paper mill in south-western Finland in 1865, Nokia has turned itself into a global telecommunications leader over a century and a half of innovation. It entered the Chinese market in 1985 and has won the biggest share of the mobile device market since 2004, which by 2008 had reached 38.8% (CCID, 2008a). The fact that mobile phones have become a lifestyle product and are important facilitators of people’s connected social life make the company an ideal case for study. According to The Economist ("From cell-phones to self-phones," 2002), Nokia was the first mobile phone manufacturer to incorporate lifestyle as a main dimension in the product category.
In recent years, mobile device manufacturers have been facing a decline in revenue, as market growth was slow and mainly coming from low-profit markets such as rural area and third or fourth tier cities (CCID, 2008a). Decreasing profit margins resulted from homogeneity in product and increased competition from domestic brands such as K-Touch, Lenovo, Gionee, Changhong and Bird; cloned or fake foreign brands assembled and OEMed without license; and refurbished retired handsets found on the market (Barboza, 2009). Further, Apple’s iPhone has introduced new forms of mobile consumption and challenged the long-time players in the industry by refiguring the history, design and habitus of mobile phone culture, and pushing the mobile much more towards the world of computers and Internet (Goggin, 2009). As consumers increasingly embraced mobile content and services, not only for individual consumption but also for social networking, mobile content and services have become the next growth point for industry players, including mobile device manufacturers. Nokia 132
responded to these changes and readjusted its strategy to “build trusted consumer relationships by offering compelling and valued consumer solutions that combine beautiful devices with context enriched services” (Nokia Inc., 2008i).
In August 2007 Nokia launched its Internet services under the brand of Ovi, meaning door in Finnish. With the launch of Ovi services, Nokia intended to “transform the Internet to become a more personal and relevant part of consumers’ lives” (Nokia, Dec 02. 2008). Nokia’s transition to an Internet company was clearly signalled by its President and CEO Ollo-Pekka Kallasvuo’s speech at Nokia Go Play event in London in 2007:
The industry is converging towards Internet driven experiences and Ovi represents Nokia’s vision in combining the Internet and mobility…Looking into the future, we will deliver great devices, combining with compelling experiences and services, to make it easy for people to unlock the potential of the Internet. (Nokia, August 29, 2007)
Yet, in an effort to maintain market position, build brand loyalty, and drive the mobile Internet content and service market in China, the transition from mobile phone manufacturer to mobile service provider was not an easy one for Nokia. Under such challenges, the company leveraged mobile media in innovative marketing campaigns to establish its image as a leader in the mobile service market and to build relationships with its target consumers.
Launched by Nokia at the end of 2008, E63 is an affordable Smartphone targeting young professionals. It has push email as one of its most important features, supporting both business and personal email use. The device is available in red, blue and black, a feature which became the inspiration for the marketing campaign based on a multi-storyline mobile novel. During the campaign period from September 16 to October 30, 2009, the campaign delivered an individualistic brand experience through content customization by allowing people to make choices among three life attitudes corresponding to the three colours at decision points of the novel.
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In addition to promoting E63, the marketers at Nokia also aimed to promote Nokia’s Ovi email4 service in this campaign. Ovi email was a free service formally launched by Nokia on February 20, 2009, and can be accessed on Nokia mobile phone or any PC with a 1GB storage. By employing Ovi email as a content delivery tool via PC or mobile, and a content customization interface, the campaign allowed consumers to not only express their attitude towards life but to also experience the Ovi email service in the process. Therefore the campaign was not only about E63, the mobile device, but also about Ovi email service, which was an important footnote to Nokia’s transition to a mobile Internet service provider.
5.3 Campaign cooperative strategies
The campaign was a joint effort by Nokia and Shanda. Both are active players in the mobile content and service market in China. Established in July 2008 as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Shanda Interactive Entertainment Limited (NASDAQ: SNDA), Shanda Literature had captured over 80% of the market share in online literature in China by February 2010. The publishing platforms under it include several leading literature websites in China, including Qidian, Hongxiu, and JinJiang. Shanda Literature has established a unique business model in the online literature market in China, which is based on reader subscription to online writers’ works published on literature portals where revenue is shared with writers. These sites can be accessed via mobile, and the works are published on multiple platforms to maximize profits. Meanwhile, as a kind of creative content, the works also helps Shanda Literature to achieve potential synergies by licensing online novels to film studios, music producers, game developers and offline publishers for adaptation. The platforms have played an important role in nothing short of a literary renaissance online in China, particularly among young people (Farrar, 2009).
According to Yang Weidong, marketing director at Nokia, Greater China area, when the marketers were searching for a campaign idea, Shanda was building its business around the mobile literature platform (IT Chaoren, 2009c). In July 2009,
4 As a free value-added service offered by Nokia for its users, Ovi email was meant to solidify its market position and enhance brand loyalty. It allowed users to access @ovi.com email addresses without the need to operating on a PC. It targeted at the developing countries including China, where not everyone has a PC. The number of registered users reached 1 million within six months of launch, and has since been growing at a rate of 1 million new users per month (Nokia Inc., 2010). 134
Shanda started a mobile literature contest at its platform Moga.cn with the aim of discovering and promoting the first-generation mobile literature writers in China. The marketers found that cooperation with Shanda would be a good opportunity to address mobile literature readers, which had a big overlap with its target consumers. As Wu Yingqun, marketing manager at Nokia China, said at the press conference on launch day, “We found there was a big overlap between E63 target users and Shanda Literature’s users. We wanted to connect with our target consumers in their way, via online literature which was accessed via PC or mobile” (IT Chaoren, 2009a). This campaign was also an experiment in mobile marketing. As Wu continued, “The emerging market of online literature readers was never addressed in marketing efforts in China before, and we were excited about this experiment” (IT Chaoren, 2009a).
For Shanda, it was a good opportunity to promote its online and mobile literature platforms. For many young writers, it was an opportunity to find their voices on online publishing platforms, as it was hard to find a platform for their work in a traditional publishing industry which often faced state censorship (Farrar, 2009). One week before the launch of the campaign, the first episode of the novel had already been published on two original literature publishing sites qidian and jinjiang run by Shanda Literature, as well as the Shanda’s mobile literature platform, www.moga.cn and wap.moga.cn. After the launch of the campaign, the novel was updated daily for readers to follow. The literature sites under Shanda delivered multi-platform reading experiences via PC or mobile. Content delivery using multiple platforms was an attempt to reach and interact with more people, while also promoting the consumption of mobile literature.
Shanda also took advantage of this opportunity to build consumer awareness of its mobile literature platform “MOGA” (moga.cn), which was dedicated to discovering and promoting aspiring mobile literature writers. With the launch of 3G, mobile reading was gaining traction in the country. As the major copyright holder of literature works and the champion in the online literature market, Shanda was heading into the mobile field with 80% to 90% of its copyrighted print works. Mobile publishing promised a lower entry barrier for amateur and semi-professional writers and an additional publishing channel as well as being a revenue stream for professional writers. According to Hou Xiaoqiang, CEO of Shanda Literature, “This campaign is an important experiment for us in mobile literature. Our long-term goal is to build solid content resources in mobile literature, discover and develop the first mobile literature writers in China” (cited in J.
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Liu, 2009).
In this campaign, Shanda’s online literature community provided the talent pool for content creation, where emerging writers served the corporate interests (See 5.4). In addition, the popular genre in the online literature communities also became a source of inspiration for the campaign design (See 5.4). This reflected the dynamics between mobile media culture, the brands, and the consumers in the value co-creation process.
As Nokia dominated the device market in China, and Shanda was the leading player in the online literature market, it was natural that the two collaborated with each other by combining their separate advantages in device and content to promote the mobile literature market. As Yang Weidong, said,
We hope to work with other important players in the industry such as content and service providers like Shanda to develop the mobile Internet service. This not only stays at product and service level, but also at marketing level. We hope to direct users’ attention to our mobile Internet service through innovative marketing (cited in IT Chaoren, 2009c).
Hou Xiaoqiang, CEO of Shanda Literature, also commented on the cooperation,
We are very happy to work with Nokia in delivering the first multi-storyline mobile novel in Chinese language and bring a fresh reading experience for our common target users. This campaign was a joint effort in exploring how literature can be leveraged in delivering marketing communications objective. It was also an effort to lead users into a mobile literature culture (cited in J. Liu, 2009).
The marketing campaign was an example of the two parties’ joint efforts in creating awareness of the mobile literature service while promoting mobile devices and mobile email services.
5.4 Corporate generated content
Figure 2 shows a distinction between user-generated content and corporate generated content in mobile-mediated co-creation brand experience. In this case, the content was pre-authored by the corporate sector, and then customized by consumers. Meanwhile, the corporate sector capitalized on grass-root writers and the popular genre that was emerging from the service provider’s literature community in content generation, which shows a dynamics between the corporate and the user.
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The novel “I’ve read your email” was jointly written by a team called “Moga Girls”. They are three female grass-roots writers who emerged as the winners of the mobile novel contest organized by Shanda Literature in July 2009. Before the campaign the three writers had all published their works on Jinjiang.com, a literature site catering to female readers, and had already enjoyed some popularity online and in the print literature market as well, especially in the female and youth literature market. They can be seen as exemplars of Pro-Ams (Leadbeater & Miller, 2004), amateurs who pursue interests at a professional level, and have since started their second career of online literature writing, and became targets of commercial operations of copyright. In this case, they were engaged in a marketing campaign to jointly create a multi-storyline novel where readers could make their choices from available options. The creative production was a collaborative work between marketers and the writers; and among the writers as well. The writers emerging from the online literature communities worked together in this case to cater to the brand owners’ target consumers and served corporate interests. As the team leader Zhong Xi said,
We first made it clear what our readers’ tastes were, then decided the theme and format of the story, planned the main plot and structure of the story accordingly. Then each author penned one of the parallel storylines, which suited their own writing style. The process completely reversed the traditional way of author-first literary creation. (IT Chaoren, 2009b)
The story was about a female white-collar worker’s life, which was designed to reflect the lifestyle of the core potential consumers. The protagonist, Ding Wenxi, was the 31-year old project manager at an international advertising company in Beijing. In the first chapter, as she was struggling with developing the marketing plan for Nokia’s launch of E63 mobile phone on a usual workday in 2009, she received an Ovi email on her E63, which was sent on June 15, 1994. As she replied “yes” to the email asking whether she would like to change her life, she was transported to fifteen years ago, where her 31-year old mind rested in the 16-year old body. The rest of the story followed as she relived her life of the past 15 years. The short message transported the protagonist back and led readers through the time-shifting narrative.
Nokia E63 and Ovi email were embedded in the novel not only to build product awareness but also to serve as a narrative device. They triggered the story development in the beginning and started a time-travel journey for the protagonist as well as the readers. The time-travel novel was a niche genre gaining increasing popularity on online
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literature websites in China. In this case, both the creative team and the genre of the novel had their origin in the online literature market, where grass-root creativity was discovered, promoted and then leveraged by corporate interests.
5.5 User customization of content
More importantly, the mobile media served as a supplementary tool for readers to make their choices at the branching points of the story to determine the subsequent development of the story. This exemplifies Leadbeater’s argument (2008) that people want tools so that they can take part rather than have services and goods delivered to them. To get the latest story development, users needed to register Ovi email accounts, as the latest content was released only via Ovi email, which could be accessed via mobile or PC. Registered users who then activated Ovi email during the campaign period also entered a lucky draw for E63 mobile phones. When registered users visited the campaign site and activated their accounts, they could choose one of three options at three critical points in the protagonist’s life, academic pursuits at 16 years old, job-seeking at 21, and marriage at 26. Each of the three storyline options, at the three critical junctures, represented an attitude towards life and corresponded to a colour of the device, with red representing “passions and dreams above all”, blue representing “wise choice to strike a balance”, and black representing “the end justifies the means”. By making decisions for the protagonist at these critical junctures in her life based on three attitudes towards life, consumers inscribed their value choices onto the protagonist’s life. By enabling people to make their own choices, the campaign provided the opportunities for consumers to customize the branded content within a pre-determined framework and also express their individuality by choosing their attitude towards life. As they made the decisions that could be life-changing for the protagonist, they became immersed in the content and the individualistic brand experience. Further, this was like a role-playing game, where players can start over and play the game again. The opportunity for seeing the impact of their actions motivated readers to consume the content multiple times, and to make different choices at the branching points.
By bringing to the time-travel novel multiple possibilities of story development, the mobile, a cultural and lifestyle object became a tool to express the individuality of the mobile owners as they made their choices. They became co-creators of meaning and value in their brand experiences. The personal nature of the mobile phone makes it a
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good medium to deliver content that appeals to individual values. Personalization is a key factor in affecting consumer attitudes towards mobile advertising, especially for female users in China (D. J. J. Xu, 2006). Consumers want choices, especially after being restrained by the planned economy for years. In this case, the mobile media facilitated people’s choices in the development of the branded content for their own consumption, which also reflected their individuality.
The mobile phones were mass customized and the content consumption was a customized brand experience. It was similar to what Wind and Rangaswamy (2001) proposed as customerization—a buyer-centric company strategy that combines mass customization with customized marketing. Under the control of customers and initiated by them, its focus is to help customers to better identify or define for themselves what they want; it is a way for companies to adapt personalization and one-to-one marketing for the digital marketing environment. In this case, engaging grass-root writers in corporate-generated content was a strategy to cater to online literature readers’ taste, who then have the opportunities to customize it into a version that is to their liking but under a pre-determined framework.
While people can make their choices among 27 versions of the novel in this campaign, user agency in deciding the story development was relatively limited, in the sense that what they read based on their choices was a certain mixture of pre-developed story segments. The campaign could have been more interactive by enabling readers to influence the writing process through mechanisms such as comments. However, that would require the brand to loosen the control, to a certain extent, on the whole campaign. By allowing a limited user agency in a pre-determined narrative framework, Nokia was still the fabricator of the content and marketing message, where co-creation was only about individual choices à la carte. While this corresponded well to the personal nature of mobile phones, it did not bring user agency into full play due to limited creative opportunities and the absence of a networked experience.
Interactivity based on branching narrative is abundant in multimedia narratives which involve trivial “point and click” actions on the part of the user (Rieser, 1997). The elevation of interface over content and meaning has been identified by Weinbren (1995) as a product of software dominating narrative form, and such reductionist approach may run the risk of overemphasizing the structure at the expense of the content. Rieser (1997) holds the same view and contends that such interactivity may 139
“liberate writers and artists from the illusion of authorial control in much the same way that photography broke the naturalist illusion in art, exposing it not as an inevitable form, but as another set of conventions” (p. 11). User contribution in content creation, on the other hand, is a step further in the spectrum of co-creation, which is evidenced in cases presented in Chapters 7 to 9.
By embedding mobile phone and mobile email into the story as the narrative device to move the story along, and, more importantly, as a supplementary tool for readers to decide the fate of the protagonist, the marketers facilitated individualistic brand experiences for consumers. This reflects the view of van Dick (2009) that the new landscape of consumer relationships are developed by providing an engaging content consumption experience using corporate generated content. Overall, the individualistic brand experience not only promoted product awareness, but also promoted a mobile lifestyle through the story itself and through readers’ experiences.
5.6 Supplementary role of mobile media
As the branded content, the novel “I’ve read your email”, at around 80,000 words, was promoted as the first multi-storyline mobile novel in the Chinese language. Mobile media delivered the individual content consumption experience via customized branded content, but it was only one of the content delivery platforms in the campaign. People could also access Nokia’s Ovi email service via PC for the customized reading experience.
Assuming a supplementary role in the multi-platform content delivery, mobile media enabled people to keep up to date with the story development on the go, which was particularly useful for following a serial novel. The real-time update, via push email, satisfied users’ curiosity ignited by the suspense in the serial novel. The multi-platform content distribution allowed a continuous brand experience, which suited people’s contexts, whether they were sitting in front of a PC at home or on the road with their mobile phone. However, as only Nokia mobile users could use Ovi email service on their mobile phones, the content delivery and customization via mobile only acted as a supplement in the campaign.
By enabling people to make choices at decision points, the story evoked an imaginary experience reflecting readers’ individual identities and attitudes towards life,
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which also moulded the protagonist’s life. The personal nature and ubiquity of mobile phones delivered value for users in the individual brand experience (J. E. Katz & Aakhus, 2002; von Hippel & Katz, 2002). However, such interactivity was limited, as has been discussed.
While the mobile as a tool in delivering a customized brand experience through interactivity assumed a supplementary role, it played an important part in the narrative text. Both E63 mobile phone and Ovi email was planted in the story to trigger the development of the plot and the protagonist’s time-travel experience of reliving her life.
5.7 Campaign Outcomes
According to Yang Weidong, the campaign delivered satisfactory results for both Nokia and Shanda by promoting their product and services as well as mobile literature in general. Building on the mobile literature culture, and leveraging the creative talents as well as a popular genre emerging out of that culture, the campaign delivered an individualistic brand experience for its target consumers by using the mobile phone as a tool of content customization.
In this campaign, Nokia became more like the media or a publisher, creating content for its target consumers and delivering it via its mobile email service and Shanda’s platforms. By cooperating with Shanda, it capitalized on the resources of grass-roots writers who had emerged from online literature sites under Shanda. The campaign delivered a satisfactory result in terms of reaching and engaging the target consumers owing to its overlap with Shanda’s users. It enhanced consumer awareness of both E63 and Ovi email. Nokia acquired Ovi email users through registrations in the campaign, and E63 was well received on the market. Shanda also benefited from the campaign, through which it promoted its platforms and raised awareness of mobile literature among both readers and writers.
As the campaign leveraged the creative talents emerging out of online publishing platforms, writers found an interesting experience as well. Wen Yu, a signed writer to Jinjiang, was one of the authors. She is a professional translator, and has, since 2003, committed to online novel writing by setting up a column at Jinjiang as a signed writer. According to her, “Collaborative writing with two other writers, and creating a work with multiple storylines is a fresh and fulfilling experience for me. I enjoyed the creative
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process very much” (cited in J. Liu, 2009). The marriage of the mobile literature culture and brand marketing extended the creativity activity of grass-root writers, moving them from amateur to professional in this case. As brands became more like media, offering content on their own platforms, it also opened up the possibility of working with commercial interests beyond the publishing industry.
The campaign successfully promoted the culture of mobile literature through the partnership between Nokia and Shanda. The novel became popular online as the first multi-storyline mobile novel and Moga girls became known as the first mobile novel creation team in China. This enhanced public awareness of mobile literature and promoted its further development, which was beneficial to both parties. As Nokia intended to make a strategic transition towards a mobile Internet service provider; and Shanda continued to expand its market in online literature, particularly in the mobile market, their separate resources in devices, services, content creation and distribution platforms, including mobile platforms, facilitated co-creative brand experiences. The joint efforts of the device manufacturer and the online publisher also reflected industry convergence as they collaborated to build the mobile content and service market.
5.8 Conclusion
By enabling participants to make their choices in a branching narrative created by emerging writers from the online literature market, the Nokia E73 campaign appealed to the target consumers’ taste, and delivered an individualistic brand experience of meaning and value co-creation. The novelty effect of personalizing content via mobile was appealing to young people, who craved new ways to express their individuality and to interact with brands.
The mobile acted as a supplementary tool to facilitate the content customization, and to actualize users’ agency. The mobile became a medium through which individuals declared their life attitude, and during this process an intimate bond between consumers and the protagonist in the story, and thus the brand, was formed. However, choosing from pre-developed story segments did not enable a full-blown individuality.
This campaign demonstrated the dynamics between mobile culture and mobile marketing. The development of the online and mobile literature culture led to marketing innovation, which assisted the brand owner in connecting and interacting with the target consumers. The cooperation between the brand owner and the service provider in the 142
marketing campaign leveraged the emerging writers and the popular genre in the online literature community in generating branded content to attract target consumers. The product placement in the corporate-generated content also helped to promote the mobile device and email services. As a result, the campaign promoted products and services as well as mobile literature to the benefit of all parties.
Nokia adopted the mobile media to connect with their target consumers in a relevant, fresh and engaging way. While the technological factors had a positive impact on the brand owners’ adoption of mobile media, its innovation orientation, target market fit, and organizational readiness motivated marketers to communicate with their target consumers via mobile media. Competitive pressure, consumer readiness, and market supply were the most influential environmental factors in the campaign.
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Chapter 6 Nokia Supernova campaign
This chapter examines the Nokia Supernova campaign in 2008, which also delivered individual brand experience based on corporate generated content. It is an example of a marketing campaign where mobile media acts as the central text and tool for interactive content consumption in hybrid space. It sits in quadrant 2 of the matrix shown in Figure 2. Environment Virtual Space Hybrid Space
Centrality of mobile Supplementary role Central role media Content CGC Supplementary content Central narrative device & delivery/customization tool tool in content (individual consumption experience) Nokia E63 Campaign 1 Nokia Supernova Campaign 2
UGC Supplementary tool & Central tool & platform in platform for content location-based experience (communal presumption experience) Clean & Clear Clear Fairness TNF Virtual Red Flag Campaign 3 Nokia Fusion Challenge 4 FIGURE 2 Matrix of mobile-mediated co-creation brand experiences. 6.1 Introduction
From the content people consume to the intimate details they share, the mobile has become central in people’s lives with its inherent mobility, ubiquity, and multi-functionality. As people’s lives are increasingly documented and shared via the mobile, the mobile has become a window into people’s lives. It is redrawing personal boundaries, and negotiating the meaning of the pubic and the private. Kopomaa (2000) has suggested that in the city, mobile phones bring new life to public spaces, offering a “third place” for social interaction to take place, outside of home and work. It has been suggested that mobile phones have profoundly changed young people’s definition of their personal space (Oksman & Turtianinen, 2004), allowing more control over the various spaces they move through (Skog, 2002) as they “take with them their entire social community wherever they go” (Oksman & Turtianinen, 2004, p. 332). For Cooper (2002), mobile phones have a key role in reconfiguring public spaces and our thinking about what public spaces are, further blurring distinctions between public/private, 144
close/distant and work/leisure. It also destabilizes the traditional dichotomization between mass communication and interpersonal communication, and, therefore, between mass media and personal media (Lüders, 2008). As individuals use the mobile to create and share personal expressions through digital networks, it also activates people’s inner voyeur.
As Holbrook (2001, p. 81) insightfully pointed out, “For whether we like it or not, many and perhaps most consumers are voyeurs (as evidenced, for example, by window shopping, people watching, Life Styles of the Rich and Famous, and the massive popularity of reality-based TV programs such as Survivor).” He also argued that exhibitionism, the flip side of voyeurism, exists in all consumers. This claim has an embryonic existence in the work by Schmitt (1999) on Experiential Marketing, where he called attention to the “social meaning of the brand” (p. 171). In particular, the essence of marketing is to “get people to relate to other individuals as well as to entire groups and cultures via brands” (p. 175).
From the brand of the mobile to the accessories, from the applications installed to the content stored and consumed, the mobile phone and the associated content and service consumption became “signals to convey or express people’s actual, desired, or ideal self-concepts to others” (Holbrook, 2001, p. 81). The exhibitionism implies the need for someone to watch and thereby reinforces a trend toward voyeurism on a massive scale (Holbrook, 2001). While instances of voyeurism have produced a privacy panic, Holbrook (2001) argued for the exhibitionistic-voyeuristic symbiosis. Specifically, when privacy has virtually disappeared, voyeurism will reign supreme and call for the reciprocal exercise of exhibitionism.
Neal Gabler (1998) explicated how consumer culture turns life into entertainment and how all branches of reality, including the common or mundane aspects of everyday life, take on the characteristics of show business. In his words on the dust jacket, “how all of us are not only an audience for the life spectacular, but also performance artists acting out our own dramas within it.”
The mobile, then, with its central role in everyday life, particularly among the youth, becomes an important part of the show. For marketers, the opportunity arises for leveraging the mobile to weave the marketing narrative around exhibitionism and voyeurism, to enable an interactive brand experience.
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The following part of the chapter presents a marketing campaign by Nokia to leverage the inner voyeur within people to relate to its youth audience, who live a mobile-centric life. The Nokia Supernova campaign evolved around four serial online videos titled Modeng Huanxiang, which were released one by one on every Friday from September 26, 2008 to October 20, 2008 on the campaign site http://www.playpop.cn/. The web series was about identity exchanges between main characters, who needed to live other people’s lives for one day as a result of exchanging their mobile phones. The campaign was built upon transmedia storytelling, which according to Henry Jenkins (2006a, pp. 20-21), is “a new aesthetic that has emerged in response to media convergence”, where audiences act as “hunters and gatherers, chasing down bits of the story across media channels” – a participatory process that can potentially result in a “richer entertainment experience”. The mobile assumed a central role in the transmedia storytelling as a narrative device in the online series, and through integration with outdoor screens, it facilitated an interactive experience for participants in a hybrid world.
6.2 Campaign background
Launched in the autumn of 2008, the Nokia Supernova range (7610s, 7510a,7310c, 7210c) included four mid-range handsets, a remake of the older devices, namely 7210 and 7310 monoblocks, 7510 flip, and 7610 slider. The range featured “bold colors and of-the-moment designs, evoking the allure of the latest statement handbags or must-have sunglasses” (Nokia Inc., 2008c). The four products came with colourful exchangeable covers that were able to be refreshed to mirror users’ personalities and to match their social lifestyles. The replaceable covers were a way to individualize and enhance the product offering, which enabled people to swap covers to match their outfit or their mood. Among the four products, 7310c could be customized by consumers before purchase, enabled by the service “Nokia Build”. The pre-built template allowed consumers to create a cover from scratch, with their own photos, to personalize the product and differentiate themselves from others.
According to the agency brief, the products targeted those aged 18-30, mostly women, living in big and medium sized cities, who were passionate about life, love fashion, and have particular preference about rich colours. They were people who had a strong personal opinion in consumption and considered appearance to be one of major concerns in their purchase decisions. With the Supernova range, Nokia tried to attract style conscious consumers who wanted to show their personalities through their mobile
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phone. As Jo Harlow, vice president, LIVE5 category, Nokia, said, “As we rely more heavily on mobile phones to stay connected, they increasingly know everything about us and have become a window into our world. With the Supernova range, we set out to give people the ability to set themselves apart in the same way that they would with a traditional statement accessory” (Nokia Inc., 2008c).
In addition to improving the brand’s style credentials, the launch of the Supernova range was also Nokia’s attempt to address stagnating youth preferences for Nokia in China. The launch of the Supernova range came at a time when Nokia had become disconnected from a younger, mid-market, style-oriented audience, a group representing a significant portion of the population of China, neither making relevant devices nor engaging them with communication. At the same time, competitors like Samsung had been aggressively targeting these younger segments with communication and stylish phones. Youth preference is a strong driver of market share, average sales price, and margins. Left unaddressed this would represent a threat to the future of the business. Against this background, Nokia wished to reconnect with the youth market with the launch of the Supernova range. Therefore the brand needed to get closer to the youth audience by understanding what their mobile phones meant to them, to fit into their increasingly digital lives and to engage them in the brand experience.
As the Supernova range was a remake of the previous products, the key in communication was to create an emotional rather than a functional appeal. Rich content and interactivity are important in building emotional connections. The campaign evolved around the concept of “exchanging mobile phones means exchanging lives” to provide rich content and interactivity for people. The campaign idea not only captured the role of mobile as a window to one’s life, but also tapped people’s inner voyeurism. As David Tang, Vice President of sales, Nokia Greater China area, said,
Mobile has become a personal logo; a tool for communication and sharing; a window to people’s life… Nokia hopes to bring an entertaining experience to consumers through the digital interactive campaign, and connect with all fashionable people by sharing with them the lifestyle of the characters in the videos revealed by the mobile (Nokia Inc., 2008a).
5 Live category targets young people, especially under 30 years old, who are Style Leaders, Style Followers, Image Seekers and Life Builders. 147
In the campaign, an online video series presented a drama resulting from exchanging mobile phones between the characters. By exchanging their mobiles they also lived each other’s life, thus revealing different lives of the characters. It reflected the role of mobile phones in people’s lives and invited consumers to get to know the fictional characters through their mobile phones. Equally important as the story was the need to eschew the passivity of one-way broadcast in favour of more participatory forms of storytelling. The mobile served an important role in enhancing interactivity in this campaign, where people were encouraged to seek out more content, via their mobile, in transmedia storytelling. The campaign was aimed at attracting consumers to view and interact with the online video series, to build identification with the fashionable lifestyle presented in the series, and to promote product recall and preference to generate sales. As mentioned by Brian Zhai, General Manager at the mobile agency MMX China, “All that we are trying to do was to create a good story that consumers would want to seek out, which would lead to a good conversation” (Zhai,
2010).
6.3 Mobile’s role
6.3.1 Mobile in the narrative
The story was set in Shanghai in the autumn of 2008, when the campaign was launched. Hong Kong star Sam Lee played Sam, a DJ, actor and designer, who swapped his phone with two of his friends, a stylist and a photographer, as a result of losing a game. Sam had to follow the calendars of his friends’ mobile phones and literally lived a day of each mobile owner’s life. He spent two days first as a stylist and then as a photographer and completed their daily work with aplomb. Interestingly, he used a Nokia mobile to capture nice shots of models. After that he was regarded as a versatile, fashionable man.
Model Amber Xu played the female character Coco, a fashion buyer and synchronized swimming trainer. She challenged Sam, and they exchanged their mobile phones to see if Sam could live a day of her life. Following Coco’s mobile calendar, Sam needed to buy the female fashion items according to the photos in Coco’s mobile, and teach a class of girls to do new tricks in synchronized swimming. After he creatively completed both tasks and came to return the mobile to Coco, he found that the mobile actually belonged to one of Coco’s friends. 148
To know more about the story, consumers needed to go to the campaign site and call a designated service number. On the campaign website, visitors could peep into Coco’s calendar, photos, videos, and her messages to Sam stored in her mobile. Calling the service number allowed people to listen to the dialogues between characters which were unrevealed in the online series.
In the online series, the mobile phone became a narrative device. It served as the premise of the whole story, a narrative device to reveal or conceal the content, a social hub and emotional tie connecting the characters, a micro-coordination tool (R. Ling & Yttri, 2002) among the characters, a multifunctional tool for characters to take action.
The mobile, with its central role in young people’s lives, served as the premise upon which the story was founded. The story opened with a circle of friends playing a game, and the protagonist had to exchange his mobile with his friends as a result of losing the game. The story evolved from that point, and when the protagonist spent a whole day acting the life of the mobile’s owner, the story moved on with another round of the game.
The mobile also served as the device to reveal or conceal the content. The content within the mobile, such as messages, photos and videos stored in female characters’ mobile phones, and the conversation over the mobile, were important pieces of information for viewers to make sense out of the whole story. Viewers needed to go to the campaign site to look for more clues stored in the mobile, and to call the service number to listen to the conversations between characters. The interaction allowed viewers to get to know the main characters and follow their interactions in intimate detail.
The mobile enabled ‘co-presence’ (Ito & Okabe, 2005) between the owners who exchanged their mobile phones in the story. Building on the idea that text messaging created new kinds of modalities for co-presence and communication, Ito and Okabe (2005) suggested an emergent visual sharing modality, intimate visual co-presence, that is key to the personal, pervasive and intimate nature of social connections via mobile phones. The trial they conducted on mobile phone sharing indicated that intimate visual co-presence can ‘fill an important social niche’ (p.1). This idea can be borrowed in this campaign where mobile phones are exchanged between the characters. In this campaign, while the owner was not physically with the protagonist, the mobile allowed the owner
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to know what had happened to the protagonist during his absence. This created a shared memory for both the mobile owner and the protagonist, and built the emotional connection between them. When Sam was struggling in the swimming pool, his picture was taken by a little girl that he thought had fallen into the pool. The girl used Coco’s mobile to take the photo. On the campaign website, or WAP site, people could see the photo in Coco’s mobile as a message sent to Sam, with the note saying “first time in the pool”. The message was sent by Coco to Sam to ridicule him, which allowed people an insight into the delicate relationship between the two. Even though Coco was not with Sam after she exchanged the mobile phone with him, the mobile became Coco’s eyes to witness Sam’s life. By enabling this “co-presence” (Ito & Okabe, 2005), the mobile created a memory for both Sam and Coco and developed their relationship as the story moved along.
Further, the capability of the mobile to store and share content brought opportunities for its owners to build and establish social relationships. When Coco challenged Sam to exchange the mobile phone with her, she had stored in the mobile beforehand photos and videos she had taken of Sam on a previous evening at the pub, while Sam was playing DJ. When Sam later found the photos and videos, he pieced the information together and it suddenly occurred to him that Coco had a crush on him. In this case, the mobile became a tool for Coco to express her feelings, and a tool for Sam to discover her feelings.
Apart from the shared memory and the emotional communication enabled by co-presence, the mobile also helped to move the story forward as a daily organizer and micro-coordination tool (R. Ling & Yttri, 2002) in the characters’ daily life. The most obvious example of this was that the calendars and alarms stored in the mobile reminded Sam of the daily work he had to do as the mobile’s owner. Another example was that when Sam was in the swimming pool, trying to teach synchronized swimming, he came up with the idea of using his DJ skills as the accompaniment to the swimmers. However, he needed to get his DJ set to the swimming pool, and that was where the mobile came in. Sam used the mobile to call for help from one of his friends, who brought his DJ set to the swimming pool. That helped Sam to complete the tasks in Coco’s calendar, and move the story along.
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Finally, as a multifunctional technological device, the mobile came to the protagonist’s rescue in the video. One example was when Sam lived one of his friends’ life as a photographer, he used the mobile to take photos of models for the cover of a magazine because he could not produce good photos with a professional camera. It turned out that the editor of the magazine found the result very satisfying. After that Sam became known as a versatile, fashion man and was widely reported in fashion circles as a celebrity. The emphasis on the mobile as a multifunctional technological device reflected the central role of the mobile in everyday life. This evoked a sense of connection with viewers, who also used the mobile in similar ways.
Overall, the online series spoke to the target consumers’ lifestyle through the characters’ use of mobile phone. More importantly, the mobile phone played a central role in narrative construction, introducing viewers to a drama of exchanging identities, and moving the story forward. The messages, calendars, photos, videos stored in the mobile phones provided important clues and gave different perspectives, and enriched the content for viewers.
6.3.2 Mobile in co-created experience
Mobile content delivery. Advertising was run on mobile sites, including sina.cn, kong.net and qq.com, to generate broad awareness, and also appeared on second–tier media channels on fashion, beauty and travel across MMX China mobile media partners, and a mobile magazine, Rayli, which targets young, fashionable women.
These ads led users to the campaign WAP site, which offered them various content, including plot summary, mobile video, stage photo, mobile theme and music for downloading, and also product information about the Supernova range. The content was updated frequently to attract continuous attention from visitors. Mobile videos in the format of 3GP were developed for viewing on mobile phones. 3GP format was co-developed by Nokia and Apple and supported by most mobile phones on the market. The biggest advantage of this format was its small size, which meant faster download and economic use of memory space. This was very important for users; otherwise they would not bother to download the video, which could be slow and costly. The WAP site also invited visitors to register as members and to opt in for MMS updates for the release of new episodes.
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Mobile MMS played an important role in keeping a continuous communication with its core target consumers. All the registered users at campaign website, or the WAP site, received an MMS every week when the new video was released online. It invited them to come back to the campaign site to view the new video, download the mobile video from the WAP site, and participate for prizes in quizzes. A Nokia 7610s was given away every week as the incentive. Within the month of the campaign, the core target consumers became closely connected to the campaign via MMS alerts. Mobiles served as a convenient tool to keep a continuous engagement with people, especially in a campaign spanning over a relatively long period, from 26 September, 2008 to 20 October, 2008.
Mobile as a supplementary tool in eavesdropping. Viewers could dial a designated service number from their mobile phones or their fixed lines and listen to recordings of what characters in the video said to each other on their phones. This was not available in online videos. Consumers could get a more real and vivid experience through mobile eavesdropping. The content was updated with the progress of the online videos, and varied with the time of the calls. For example, for the first week, those who made the call before 12:00 in the morning could listen to the dialogue between Sam and the stylist. Those who called in between 12:00 in the morning and 18:00 could listen to a media interview of Sam, revealing his experience as a cross-border fashion man. After 18:00 it became the dialogue between Sam and his friend about the get-together in the evening. Callers can also choose to review the previously revealed dialogues. The call transported people to the world of the narrative and enabled them to explore the temporal shifts in the story.
Some elements in the narrative enhanced the realness, and blurred the line between the real and the narrative world. For example, the main characters used their real English names in the online series to generate a sense of realness. In addition, the lead male actor played a character who had the same professions as himself, a young DJ who was also an actor and a fashion designer. These narrative designs introduced real-life elements and enhanced the sense of realness in the eavesdropping experience.
By simply calling the service number people were able to get the missing piece of the puzzle and fill the gaps left in the online series. While the mobile is becoming increasingly powerful, it is still a telephone with a fundamental audio capability. In this case, making a call became the access point to the unrevealed conversations between 152
characters. The phone offered them access to a central piece of a puzzle that was denied to others.
As the mobile phone conversations between the characters were hidden from the online series and were only available through “eavesdropping”, the mobile assumed the role of an interface of a hybrid space, connecting people in the physical world to the narrative world. While satisfying people’s inner voyeur, it also provided a temporal-spatial shift for them. The eavesdropping not only launched people from the physical world to the narrative world, but it also flashed back to previous conversations between the characters. The void in the narrative, in this case the mobile conversations, was filled by the viewer’s phone call, and the mobile acted as a narrative device at the viewer’s disposal. By taking the initiative to make the phone call to seek out the hidden content for a whole understanding of the narrative, people engaged in a co-created experience. As people could also make the calls using a fixed telephone, the mobile was an optional way for discovering more about the online series.
Mobile as central interface of hybrid space in outdoor experience. In addition to the eavesdropping experience, the mobile also engaged participants in the co-created brand experience, as it was combined with outdoor screens in the physical world. As the Supernova range was targeted at trendy people, display advertising was put on screens in cinemas and metro lines in six big and medium-sized cities in China. In Shanghai, for example, the brand selected a metro station in the heart of the city’s shopping district. The screen showed some selected scenes from the online series and short messages stored in the characters’ mobiles, which were frequently updated as the story evolved. People could take a photo of the screens and upload it to the campaign site to receive message updates. Meanwhile, people’s contact information was fed into the brand’s database for future communication. The update alerts also served to draw people back to the online series and the more engaging experience via mobile. Outdoor screens were used to enhance campaign awareness and, more importantly, were used as a conduit to mobile screens, bringing people to the online series and enabling them to experience a deeper engagement via the mobile.
The mobile became an interface of hybrid space, as people took photos of the outdoor screen and uploaded them onto the campaign site. As passers-by were attracted by the outdoor screens and took the expected action of uploading photos, they too were present both in the real world and the imagined world. The mobile interface was the 153
entry and exit points for the fictional narrative, and it blurred the line between the real and the imagined world.
The capabilities intrinsic to the mobile, such as ubiquity and multi-functionality, and its integration with outdoor media, allowed it to be an interface in a hybrid world, where the lines between the real and the narrative became blurred. Content appeared on the outdoor screens and encouraged passers-by to elicit more content. The mobile became an access point for people in the physical world to enter the narrative world. Therefore, both the story and the storytelling existed in a hybrid world, where the mobile acted as a central interface. As the mobile assisted people in navigating and understanding the nonlinear narrative in a hybrid world, it delivered an interactive experience to those who made efforts to piece together the story. As Brian Zhai (2010), the person behind the mobile marketing solution, mentioned during the interview, “We were not only trying to launch and sell the handset. More importantly, we were trying to build preference among younger consumers for Nokia and to communicate to that audience in the media they are accustomed to using”.
Overall, the mobile assumed a central role not only in the narrative, but also in enabling a continuous and interactive brand experience. People sought out the hidden content stored in the characters’ mobiles to satisfy their inner voyeur and engaged themselves in a meaning-making process in a hybrid space. While the mobile was an optional tool for the eavesdropping experience, it assumed a central role as an interface in launching people into the narrative.
The role of the mobile phone in the narrative traces back to the telephone in the narrative as motif/symbol, as both narrative premise and the “technology of travel”, as a tool for bridging two separate worlds: the physical space of the viewer and the “virtual” space of the mind (Ruston, 2008).
In his analysis of the telephone as a tool to bridge separate worlds in science fiction or fantasy, Ruston (2008)wrote,
To some extent, this genre literalizes the liminal space of all narrative—that cognitive process of constructing, in a separate space in the mind, an interlocking set of rules, events, and agents that makes sense and meaning out of that set of information. That separate space of the mind is the imagination, which can also be termed “virtual” as it has no physical manifestation, constructed through the mind’s perception. Thus, all narratives involve a connection between the physical and the
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virtual. (Ruston, 2008, p. 76)
While the telephone as the “technology of travel” allows a person to travel from time to time and from place to place in a narrative (Ruston, 2008), the mobile phone goes a step further. It goes beyond the role in the narrative, by bridging the real world of the participant with the immersive world of the narrative. As Ruston (2008, p. 6) explained, “It does so by serving as a seamless interface, both between participant and narrative information and between the physical world and the virtual. It also capitalizes on the cinematic legacy of the telephone as a narrative device and the convergence of the mobile phone with television”.
6.4 Campaign Outcomes
Building upon transmedia storytelling, this campaign allowed consumers to actively engage with a franchise that flows across different platforms, they enjoy “new levels of insight and [an] experience [that] refreshes the franchise and sustains consumer loyalty” (Jenkins, 2003; 2006a, p. 96). While “addictive comprehension” (Jenkins, 2006a) allowed viewers to enjoy a richer experience, the hidden content, including the mobile conversations between the characters and the contents stored in the characters’ mobile phones, formed a central part of the individual brand experience as viewers explored the owners’ personal space via their mobile phones.
The mobile in this campaign inherited the cinematic legacy of the telephone as a narrative device. Through its association with the trendy characters and their mobile-centric lifestyle in the story, the campaign strengthened its bond with fashionable and style conscious young consumers. The bold idea of exchanging mobiles and exchanging lives also added a touch of individualism, as the mobile has become integral to many people’s lives and acts as an extension of their personalities.
Through the convergence of the mobile phone with television, online video, and the outdoor screen, the campaign delivered a transmedia storytelling experience. The integration with the outdoor screen demonstrated mobile media’s particularity in delivering an interactive outdoor experience in a hybrid environment.
The online series attracted more than 2,000,000 visits. There were 107,000 unique visitors registered via the mobile. These became valuable input for the company’s database, and enabled the brand to periodically pull back registered users via MMS alerts.
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Altogether, 170,000 MMS alerts were sent to the registrants. By doing so the brand delivered a continuous brand experience to the existing registered users, which is cheaper than recruiting new registrations. Participation in prize quizzes reached 220,000 person-times. Overall, the narrative design, the interactive experience, and the prize quizzes effectively grabbed consumer attention, evoked their inner voyeur, increased participation, and reduced costs. CPC on mobile media was 0.217 RMB, CPA was 1.869 RMB, and CPM was 14.8RMB. This demonstrated the advantage of the mobile in generating actions.
Altogether there were 25,000 call-ins to eavesdrop on the conversations between the characters over their mobile phones. Compared to the more than 2,000,000 visits to the online videos, only a small number of viewers were led to the mobile calls. This may be explained by the nature of hidden content, which was more a bonus than an absolute necessity for the viewers to make sense of the online videos.
This shows that while transmedia storytelling offers an interactive experience by allowing people to navigate through scattered content, it also has the risk of turning away people because of the extra effort. In this case, as the narrative was distributed across media in bits and pieces, people needed to navigate through a nonlinear text to follow the mobile-centric lives of the characters and the entertaining storyline resulting from swapping mobiles. They needed to navigate the campaign site, make calls, or take a photo of the outdoor screens to construct a full understanding of the whole story. While the non-linear transmedia storytelling enhances interactivity for a campaign, it is imperative to create content that people want to explore rather than bypass.
Overall, by utilizing the mobile as a tool for exhibitionism and voyeurism, both in the narrative and in enabling the interactive brand experience through transmedia storytelling, the campaign reflected the evolved role of the mobile in everyday life, spoke to the culture of its target audience, and delivered a fresh interactive experience. The comparatively small number of mobile call-ins showed that the content design needed be intriguing and worthwhile for participants to take the extra effort in activating the interactive experience.
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6.5 Conclusion
In the Nokia Supernova Campaign the brand owner adopted the mobile to reach fashionable and style conscious young consumers, to build consumer identification with a mobile-centric lifestyle, and to strengthen its bond with them by delivering an entertaining and interactive brand experience through transmedia storytelling. The individual experience matched well with the idea of exchanging mobiles and exchanging lives in the corporate generated content, which reflected the personal nature of the mobile phone.
The mobile acted as the central narrative device in the online series, where it witnessed the cinematic legacy of the telephone and the convergence with online videos. While the mobile phone is gaining more sophisticated functions, it still remains a phone. This campaign demonstrated how the mobile phone can enhance interactivity through the basic function of making a call, and refashioned storytelling not only through its role in the narrative but also through the way the narrative was delivered. The mobile acted as an entry point to the hidden content in the transmedia experience, and was the interface in the hybrid space to assist a full understanding of the narrative to deliver an interactive and entertaining experience.
While the mobile was an optional tool for the eavesdropping experience, it assumed a central role in delivering the experience in a hybrid space owing to its portability and its integration with outdoor screens. The content existed both in the fictional narrative and the physical environment, and people in the physical world became connected to the narrative world for an intriguing brand experience.
It should be noted, however, that it would be hard to draw people into the interactive narrative without intriguing content as they need to invest time and effort. Therefore, for brand owners, it is important to make sure that the story itself is worth all the extra effort to satisfy consumers. Meanwhile, the mobile also played an important role in delivering a continuous communication with consumers, as MMS alerts pulled back registered users when periodic updates of content were available online over the one-month campaign period.
Overall, the mobile assumed a central role in the campaign. The mobile-centric lifestyle of the characters in the story, the mobile’s role as narrative device, and the transmedia storytelling worked together to engage a young audience by recognizing 157
what their mobile phone meant to them. As they entered the private space of the virtual characters, their mobile phones fed people’s inner voyeur as an individual brand experience.
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Chapter 7 Clean &Clear Clear Fairness Campaign
This chapter examines the Clean & Clear Clear Fairness Campaign in 2009, which is an example of the role of mobile media shown in quadrant 3 of Figure 2, where it acts as a supplementary tool and platform for content co-creation.
Environment Virtual Space Hybrid Space
Centrality of mobile Supplementary role Central role media Content CGC Supplementary content Central narrative device & delivery/customization tool tool in content (individual consumption experience) Nokia E63 Campaign 1 Nokia Supernova Campaign 2
UGC Supplementary tool & Central tool & platform in platform for content location-based experience (communal presumption experience) Clean & Clear Clear Fairness TNF Virtual Red Flag Campaign 3 Nokia Fusion Challenge 4 FIGURE 2 Matrix of mobile-mediated co-creation brand experiences.
7.1 Introduction
Micro-blogging service saw its beginning in China in 2006, when Twitter had operated in the United States for more than one year. Micro-blogging allows users to write brief texts on the go and share them with followers via text messaging, instant messaging, email or the web. Microblogging provides a light-weight and easy form of communication which enables users to broadcast and share information about their activities, opinions, and status (Java, Song, Finin, & Tseng, 2007). Compared to blogging, it lowers users’ requirements of time and thought investment for content generation, and the frequency of updates is higher.
In China, service providers quickly followed Twitter. The leading mobile portal, 3G, launched a similar service, Bula, in August 2008. However, some pioneering service providers such as Fanfou, Jiwai and Digu were shut down when the government tightened its policy on social networking services in 2009. It staged a comeback when Sina launched its micro-blogging service “Weibo” in August 2009. It is now the most 159
popular microblogging platform in China. Sina has the relative advantage of being a leading online portal in China in attracting users; and the celebrity users in the media and entertainment industries attracted swarms of fans. In terms of functionality, there are small but important differences in Sina’s Weibo that makes it more than a Twitter clone. Unlike Twitter, Sina Weibo allows users to post videos and photos, comment on other people’s updates, and easily add comments when re-posting a friend’s message. As a burgeoning media or communication tool, the novelty effect appealed to young people, who love to express themselves in new ways. Sina’s Weibo built up a big user base quickly for its micro-blogging service. Its user base hit 1 million within 66 days of launch, and reached 50 million by the end of October 2010 (Sina Corp., 2010). Other service providers closely followed Sina and released their micro-blogging service. Now half a dozen other Chinese Internet companies run similar products, with Tencent and Sohu being Sina's most serious competitors (Hille, 2011).
Mobile-dominant access and language efficiency are two distinct features of micro-blogging in China. While mobile phones are used to send less than 20 percent of Twitter updates in the United States, nearly half of Sina Weibo’s updates are sent via mobile phones (T. Crampton, 2011). That points to the growth of China’s mobile Internet. In addition, within the word limit of 140 characters, users can express more with Chinese language, as each character in Chinese is a word. This presents opportunities for marketers to engage target consumers in a co-creation brand experience, as in the case of Clean & Clear Clear Fairness Campaign.
7.2 Campaign background
Clean & Clear is the global teen skincare brand from the house of Johnson & Johnson, which is committed to innovative skincare that “bring science to the art of beauty to produce innovative products with great clinical performance, as well as a look, smell and feel that’s right” (Johnson & Johnson Services Inc, 2010, p. 12). China represents one of the emerging global markets with the largest growth opportunities for Johnson & Johnson (Johnson & Johnson Consumer Companies, 2009). It has maintained a well-established presence in this market, where it builds local capabilities to fully integrate with the market and its people. Such efforts include the acquisition in 2008 of Beijing Dabao Cosmetics Co., Ltd., maker of a well-known and respected skincare brand in China, which further expanded Johnson & Johnson’s presence in the
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Chinese market. The establishment of the Emerging Market Innovation Center in Shanghai in 2007 was also a commitment to the China market, which develops products for emerging markets and gathers in-depth insights about the Chinese consumer. Positioned as the “Teen Skin Care Expert”, Clean & Clear hopes to give its users clean, noticeably clear and beautiful skin, instilling a sense of confidence and control. The brand entered the Chinese market in 1997 and brought with it the concept that “the beauty comes from being confident, comfortable and secure in your own skin” (Johnson & Johnson Consumer Companies). The brand owners’ innovation orientation not only resulted in scientific innovation in skincare solutions, but also drove it to adopt innovative mobile marketing. It is the first brand in China market to cater to the psychological and skincare needs of teen girls. As the teen skincare expert, Clean & Clear is committed to delivering skincare solutions to help young people to explore and experience all possibilities while growing up with confidence to face the world. As mobile media has become an important part of its target consumers’ life, it drove the brand owner to connect with its target consumers via mobile media.
The campaign was designed for the Clear Fairness (CF) line, especially the newly launched CF sun block moisturizer in 2009. Whitening products accounted for the biggest market share in both cleanser and moisturizer categories in China. The CF range was launched back in 2003. However, according to a survey conducted by the brand owner, product awareness was low, and some consumers were not aware of the fact that Clean & Clear had a whitening product range. While the CF line covered around 15% of Clean & Clear’s total business, the market performance was weak, with a very small market share compared to competitor products. Under such a market situation, the campaign aimed at building consumer awareness of the CF line’s whitening products especially designed for young skin, and to establish the credibility of the Clean & Clear CF line’s relevance to young skin needs.
The target consumers were females aged 13-24 (core target 16-24) who were looking for effective whitening products to deliver fairer skin that remained oil-free. According to the digital engagement strategist at OgilvyOne, Kate Gong (2009), who was responsible for the campaign planning, these young girls love to try all the possibilities in life and interact with close friends, and they don’t want to be excluded because of the embarrassment caused by a dark, yellowish skin tone. The CF Line was specially designed with a dual VC whitening formula to deliver a pinkish fairness to
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young skin, and its oil-free formulations avoided such youthful skin problems as oiliness, acne, and blocked pores.
According to Kate Gong (2009), in its brief to the agency, the brand owner had some knowledge about mobile media and had made clear its expectation of delivering more creative ideas in the digital-led campaign, and leveraging the power of mobile marketing. Like Nokia in its E63 campaign (See Section 5.1), Clean & Clear also leveraged online literature in its Clear Fairness Campaign. While Nokia delivered an individualistic campaign by enabling customization of storylines at several critical points in the novel, Clean & Clear went a step further by enabling a collaborative creative experience for consumers in China via micro-blogging, which shaped the narrative of the novel and the marketing campaign. It also built a viral effect through integration of mobile community culture with the campaign.
7.3 Mobile as supplementary tool and platform for content co-creation
The campaign used micro-blogging to engage potential consumers in relay novel writing over a 28-day period from October 30 to November 26, 2009. Freelance writer An Yiru, who was born in the 1980s, led the collaborative effort by writing the lead paragraphs of each chapter, which were released every two days. An started to publish her essays on the book forum Jinyong Kezhan under Sina in 2003 when she was 18 years old, and got noticed by a literary agent, who helped her to publish her works. Her youth literature books became a huge success in the market. Later she published works to explore the charms of Chinese ancient poetry, and successfully connected today’s young people to the literary heritage. Born handicapped, An became a bestselling author and role model among youth. Her confidence and self-reliance made her an ideal lead writer in the brand experience of collaborative creation. In addition, An established a connection with young people through her wide presence on the Internet, including a profile page at Qzone, one of the largest social networking service platforms, operated by Tencent under the largest web portal in China, QQ.com. Such an online connection with young people also went a long way in the campaign as she led the collaborative creative efforts. The creative opportunity for young people to collaborate with a popular writer encouraged participants to contribute content.
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In order to reflect the brand character as a teen girls’ best friend, who is confident, genuine, positive, and approachable, the brand conveyed the message about the theme of the story in the words of the lead author on the campaign site. The story was titled “Confession to Youth”, which was about young people’s self-confidence, optimistic attitude towards life, and the willingness to make efforts to achieve their goals. Under this theme the brand allowed participants to express their personality, self-confidence, outlook on life, and their life goals. In addition, participants’ submissions influenced the lead writer’s composition of the next chapter, and participants also interacted with each other during the co-creation process. Thus consumers assumed an important role in the development of the novel and the marketing narrative.
Users could log in at the campaign mobile site wap.3g.cn/cleanandclear or website http://cleanandclear.qq.com, and contribute a segment, within the word limit, to the evolving story in a relay manner. The participation process on mobile was quite similar to that via PC. The content on the mobile site was in sync with the website, which enabled participants on mobile to see submissions from PCs as well, and vice versa. For 3g.cn visitors, mobile advertising across the major channels of the site was deployed to attract participants. These channels for ad exposure included homepage, community, book mall, music channel, micro-blogging service Bula, fashion, entertainment, photo album, and astrology to attract target consumers to the campaign mini site wap.3g.cn/cleanandclear. The mobile access enabled participants to capture their creative sparks whenever and wherever they were hit by a great idea. This enabled an effortless and spontaneous creative experience without imposing heavy tasks. In the process of content co-creation, submissions reflected users’ interests, values, personality, and style of writing, which constructed an individual brand experience. The inherently personal nature of the mobile phone allowed an efficient integration of the individual consumer as a co-producer in the process of content production (von Hippel & Katz, 2002).
The mobile media served not only as a tool for individual participants to contribute content, but also as a platform of interaction and co-creation among participants, and the lead author. The creative process was a dialogic activity among participants, and between participants and the lead author. The mobile enabled participants to get the latest picture of other people’s submissions as the story developed in a constant update, which served as a foundation to build upon in their own writing. They also interacted
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with each other through comments and voting. In addition, participants interacted with the lead author, who incorporated the best submissions chosen by readers as well as participants’ feedback and comments in the creative process.
While the mobile served as a supplementary tool and platform in the co-creation process, it facilitated a convenient and spontaneous brand experience, which was both individual and communal. This addressed the complex duality in consumers’ cautious desires to express individuality and the collectivist culture of communities among the younger generation (Madden, 2005). The social media affordances of the mobile as a personal communication device were leveraged to reinscribe the collectivist culture in the communal brand experience.
The integration with the online and mobile communities at the campaign sites enhanced the role of mobile media as a platform for content co-creation. To generate participation and tease out consumer creativity, sharing, voting and commenting mechanisms in the mobile campaign site helped to produce viral effects. These mechanisms were integrated with the resources in the mobile portal 3g.cn. For example, the micro-blogging service of 3g.cn let followers know about it through status updates, and a piece of news would show in both parties’ spaces, with a link to the campaign site. Followers could also get a notice once the people they followed submitted content. Another example was the integration with the mobile reading service “book mall” at 3g.cn, where users could put the novel on their own virtual bookshelf for convenience. When other users visited their pages, the message of the campaign spread among a wider user group, who may be attracted to the campaign and take part in the relay writing as well. Users could invite their followers, via an in-site message at 3g.cn, to join their creative efforts, or ask them to vote for their favourite submissions. In addition, readers had their say on the best submissions by voting with smiley face icons. This was aligned with the culture of online literature communities, where the popularity of the works hinged on readers’ rating. They were able to leave comments on the site also. For people who were less keen on producing content, by sharing mobile content they were constructing a self-narrative (Feldmann, 2005). The interaction among users within the mobile community enhanced the co-creation experience in this case and demonstrated that the social use of mobile communications plays a dominant role in value creation (Feldmann, 2005).
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The community culture was also well integrated with the incentive mechanism. Many young people in China post their work online in the hope that their stories will be read by millions, ultimately becoming books or movies, and turning them into celebrities (Farrar, 2009). As an incentive in this campaign, the ten best submissions voted by users were incorporated by the author into each chapter’s submissions, and were integrated into the lead paragraphs of the next chapter. The novel, which included the best submissions, was available for download after all fourteen chapters were completed. The authors of the best submissions were able to see their names beside their submissions and gained recognition as a co-author of the book. Thus the winning authors became five-minute celebrities.
In addition, all authors of submissions received random virtual items, which could be used in the QQ or 3G communities. For example, the first 1000 users to upload content at the QQ site received a specially made Clean & Clear badge for their QQ avatars. And the first 100 participants to get smiley faces from voters got one month’s red diamond value-added service for free. While there were other awards, such as mobile pre-paid cards for those who got the most support from readers, the incentives addressing the culture in the online community was important in driving users to contribute content. Virtual items, including avatars, garments, accessories, and equipment in games, has long been a strong driver of the virtual economy in China. This is particularly evident in online games, where people are paid to play games like World of Warcraft, Lineage and Magic Land to earn points that are sold for real money to players of these games so they can buy virtual goods such as magic spells, amulets and swords that allow them to play the games at higher levels (Castronova, 2005). Trading of virtual items has created a “mini-economy” with its own culture in China (Kshetri, 2009; Nystedt, 2005). In this campaign, by integrating the culture of the online community, including the virtual currency and the avatar culture with the incentive mechanism, it spoke to users in the QQ or 3G community. The virtual items also added another layer to the viral effect as participants interacted with their online friends, who were attracted to join the creative party.
7.4 User-generated content
Interestingly, without hint from the marketers, some users explicitly or implicitly mentioned skin problems such as acne, or the wish to have fair and youthful skin. Such
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submissions were found right in the relay submissions to the first chapter, when there was no indication from the lead writer An Yiru. The initiative to link the novel with the brand product position can be seen as users’ wish to see their submissions selected and incorporated into the novel.
For example, one submission read:
Xie Xiao Mian wondered, “She used to have quite a few acne pimples on her face, how come the skin is problem-free now”? She looked again, and believed it was her, Chu Bing. So she walked toward her.
Another submission read:
Sizing up Chu, Xie felt less confident. After dressing up, Chu is quite attractive. She’s got a good figure and fair skin. Xie became less confident, but she had to move on with the queue.
This was leveraged by the brand to expand further on skin problems and fish for more content related to skin problems or even product placement by users. When lead writer An Yiru specifically mentioned skin problems in the second chapter, more submissions mentioned the brand Clean & Clear, or the CF lines, and their experience of using the products. This supports the findings of OgilvyOne (2010), the digital arm of Ogilvy and Mather, that Chinese social media users actually want to be friends of brands, or “frands”, a newly coined term used in the report. According to the report, Chinese users are generally highly engaged with brands online, and they see brands and the discussion of them as an integral part of their social network. In addition, as mentioned previously, integrating content co-creation with online or mobile community culture encouraged the co-creation of content.
In Nokia’s marketing campaign (See 5.1), the content was produced by the writers, and participants had the opportunity to customize their reading experience from a set menu. In the Clean & Clear campaign, the brand owner tapped into “the wisdom of the crowds” (Surowiecki, 2005), who interacted with each other and the lead author, with limited facilitation from the brand. The networked consumers with a creative urge became an important part of open innovation (Chesbrough, 2006). Some users were familiar with the rules of the game, knowing it was, after all, a marketing campaign. That did not dampen their enthusiasm to contribute content. Instead they tried to appeal to the brand owner by generating content related to the brand, the product, or the experience of using the product. While consumers had the power to influence the 166
development of the storylines in both campaigns, they played a bigger role in collaborative co-creation. When consumers collaborated willingly to contribute content appealing to the brand, UGC was, in turn, leveraged by the brand to fish for more product placement to promote awareness. In this process of co-creating content and negotiating meaning, more dynamics existed between consumer participants, the lead writer, and the marketers.
7.5 Campaign outcomes
The campaign generated more than 100,000 submissions, which almost doubled the target of 60,000 submissions. It hit the target of 60,000 submissions within two weeks of the launch. This showed young people were attracted to the fresh way of expressing themselves via micro-blogging. Media drive and the viral strategy through sharing and voting mechanisms, as well as the integration with the online and mobile community culture combined to drive participation and content co-creation. Compared to the previous campaign for whitening products in 2008, CPA was also much lower, which showed more engagement from teens in this case. However, only a little more than 6,000 users downloaded the completed novel, accounting for a small percentage of total participants. This showed that users’ enthusiasm waned after the relay writing experience ended, thus the writing was what captured the most user interest during the whole campaign. The co-creation process was more important for participants than the end product. Around 80% of submissions came from QQ visitors and 20% from 3g visitors. This could be explained by the sheer number of QQ website users. There was still a big gap in terms of user numbers between the leading website and the leading WAP site. While facilitating an experience of spontaneous content co-creation, the supplementary role of mobile media also led to less participation on mobile phones compared to that of the web.
The campaign also delivered a better-than-expected media performance. CPM on QQ.com was much lower than that of the mobile site 3g.cn, and CPC was about the same on web and mobile. This showed traditional Internet via PC delivered a better ad performance compared to mobile media, which was largely due to the huge user base of QQ. Therefore mobile media was not advantageous in delivering ad exposure. However, the exposure of the ad on the web did not necessarily lead to more user interest in the campaign, as there was not much difference between mobile users and PC users in
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terms of ad clicks. This can be explained by the higher relevancy of mobile media or more user willingness to participate in the campaign. It made up for the inadequacy of the mobile media in delivering ad exposure or broad brand awareness compared to the traditional Internet.
The average number of clicks on 3G was 42% higher than the average number of campaign ads on the site. This showed that a co-creation marketing campaign generated more user interest. On the mobile site, text links had a better ad performance than display ads. This can be attributed to the fact that mobile users were concerned about the cost of the traffic associated with the display ads. It supports previous research findings that network charges deter consumers unless marketers offer continuing incentives (Spurgeon, 2008).
Overall, the campaign achieved the target of enhancing brand and product awareness, and establishing the credibility of the Clean & Clear CF line’s relevance to young skin needs through the collaborative co-creation brand experience. According to the brand survey, both brand awareness and purchase intention of Clean & Clear whitening products went up after the campaign.
7.6 Conclusion
In this case study, mobile media served as a supplementary tool for participants to both consume and contribute content to capture their spontaneous creativity, and to provide a platform for participants to interact with each other, as well as with the lead author. Under a general theme on young people’s confidence, optimistic attitudes towards life, and pursuit of their life goals, participants contributed content to express their personality, self-confidence, outlook on life, and their life goals as they contributed content. The campaign successfully raised consumer awareness of the CF line as whitening products especially designed for young skin, and established the credibility of the Clean & Clear CF line’s relevance to the target demographic.
Sharing the approach adopted in Nokia E63 campaign (See Section 5.1), the brand owner leveraged the Pro-Ams’ (Leadbeater & Miller, 2004) creativity and the connection to the target market in the co-creation process. The interaction among participants, as well as between the participants and the lead author, influenced the storyline development such that participants assumed an important role in the co-creation 168
process. The integration with the online and mobile communities and their culture in sharing, voting and commenting mechanisms, and incentive mechanisms, augmented the campaign message and built a viral effect. When participants contributed content associated with skincare issues, the marketers leveraged the opportunity to utilize product placement to promote awareness among consumers. In this process of co-creating content and negotiating meaning, the dynamic existed between the contributing authors, the lead writer, and the marketers. Overall, mobile media as a supplementary tool and platform facilitated a co-creation brand experience, both individually and communally.
Self-expression via micro-blogging attracted a large number of participants in the content co-creation phase. The advertising and the viral strategy of sharing and voting, as well as integration with the online community culture, drove participation rates to achieve the set targets. The mobile media turned out to be a less advantageous option to deliver ad impressions, but a more cost-effective way of generating actions. The higher relevancy of mobile media among young people and young people’s willingness to participate in the campaign made up for the relatively weak performance in delivering ad impressions. Participation via the mobile platform was smaller than that of the PC platform, which may be the result of the big gap in user numbers between the leading website and the leading WAP site. The supplementary role of the tool and the platform also explained the relatively small participation rate on mobile.
Significantly, the small number of novel downloads showed that participants were more interested in the process of co-creation than the end product. In this case, the mobile media facilitated everyday creativity, and participants’ actions were consistent with the argument that creativity should be understood as a process rather than as a final product (Gauntlett, 2011, pp. 220-221).
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Chapter 8 The North Face Red Flag Campaign
This chapter examines the North Face Red Flag campaign in 2009. It delivered a collective brand experience and demonstrated the role of mobile media as the central tool and platform in location-based experience, as shown in quadrant 4 of Figure 2.
Environment Virtual Space Hybrid Space
Centrality of mobile Supplementary role Central role media Content CGC Supplementary content Central narrative device & delivery/customization tool tool in content (individual consumption experience) Nokia E63 Campaign 1 Nokia Supernova Campaign 2
UGC Supplementary tool & Central tool & platform in platform for content location-based experience (communal presumption experience) Clean & Clear Clear Fairness TNF Virtual Red Flag Campaign 3 Nokia Fusion Challenge 4 FIGURE 2 Matrix of mobile-mediated co-creation brand experiences.
8.1 Introduction
The rapid development of mobile and Internet technologies means that many people now live increasingly hybrid lives where the physical and the digital, the real and the virtual, interact. While some studies suggest that mobile phones withdraw users from physical space (Gergen, 2002; Puro, 2002), de Souza e Silva (2006) argued that a hybrid space arises when mobile technologies are used as social devices, resulting in the merging of borders between physical and digital spaces. According to de Souza e Silva, mobile phones strengthen users’ connections to physical space by enfolding remote contexts inside the present context and promoting sociability and communication in urban spaces. In addition, a new mobility is arising from the mixing of physical and virtual mobility and is breeding new forms of places as a result of the relationship between informational and other territories that constitute them (Lemos, 2010).
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While transforming the experience of space, the location-based nature of communication in digital media has led to a renaissance of cartographic representations. Maps are often indispensable to “locative media” in producing an index for the illustration of spatial relationships (Thielmann, 2010). With the development of geospatial technologies such as GPS and geographic information system (GIS) and their convergence with the Internet, maps are gaining new layers of user generated content (ABI Research, 2008). In 2008, Flickr announced that it would georeference their complete image stock. In the same year, Google announced a fundamental change in their product policy from “Google and Maps” to “Google on Maps”, which means that Google Maps and Google Earth become the platform or basic layer for any kind of information people search. Thus maps become a dominant way of interacting with networks (Thielmann, 2010).
User-generated content ranges from location sharing, and georeferenced consumer reviews and photos to map mash-ups. This has also given rise to “a class of amateurs” (Thielmann, 2010), who have created alternative versions of maps. These people form a collaborative “geocommunities” (J. Crampton, 2009; T. Crampton, 2011; Thielmann, 2010) or what Crampton (2009) called “Maps 2.0”. The new initiatives are often embedded within a mobile social networking context owing to the portability and the Internet capability of mobile phones, which enable location-based real-time experience sharing. The rediscovery and democratization of geography and cartography is often referred to as neogeography, which, according to Turner (2006), “…is about people using and creating their own maps, on their own terms and by combining elements of an existing toolset. Neogeography is about sharing location information with friends and visitors, helping shape context, and conveying understanding through knowledge of place.” These experiences can be seen as a way of combating the emptiness of urban space, to reinforce the community bonds and the meaning of place (Lemos, 2010).
With the popularity of location-based services like Foresquare, launched in March 2009 in the U.S., the incentive of online status symbols such as “mayorship” has become popular among users. As users share their location with friends by “checking in” at various physical venues via a smart phone application or by text message, they are awarded points and can collect virtual badges. For example, users who have checked in most times at a certain venue will be crowned “Mayor” until someone surpasses their number. Different levels of awards are awarded to people who check in at places more
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frequently, with more friends, or at a particular type of place. These virtual badges define people by the places they frequent, and by the people they go there with.
This becomes an invaluable opportunity for brand owners to connect with their potential consumers, and encourages them to check in at the bricks-and-mortar stores more often and to participate in events through discounts and giveaways, or with more lucrative prizes like shark diving trips. Brands such as Starbucks, PepsiCo and Safeway have used the check-in service with a reward mechanism to lure customers. The rapid growth of Foursquare and the commercial interest around it has led Facebook to enter the market with its own service, dubbed “Places”, which lets users signal where they are to their friends on the network.
The lifestyle of “checking-in” and location-sharing via mobile phones has become increasingly popular in China. Domestic service providers have followed the Foursquare model and launched similar services since 2009, including Sifang, Jiepang, and Kaikai among others. Although service providers in China started the business later than their American counterparts, they have been quick to associate the service with marketing campaigns. While Foursquare has only recently begun tapping into this lucrative area, Jiepang was already testing out collaborative campaigns with events and brands only six months after launching.
In mobile check-in services, virtual badges are used to encourage users to use the service more. They have also become effective incentives in marketing campaigns. As mentioned in Section 6.1.3, virtual items including avatars, garments, accessories, and equipment in games have long been a strong driver of the virtual economy online in China. Trading of virtual items has created a “mini-economy” with its own culture in China (Castronova, 2005; Kshetri, 2009; Nystedt, 2005), which shows people’s enthusiasm for virtual items. The exchange of virtual gifts in social networking sites also shows the significance of the culture around virtual items and the virtual economy in China.
Intrigued by the willingness of millions of consumers to pay real money for things that do not physically exist, some large companies are testing whether they can utilize virtual items to provide interactive brand experiences, raise awareness of their brands, and sell more goods. One of the best-known campaigns is the Olympic Virtual Torch Relay launched by Coca-Cola on QQ instant messenger in 2008. Through virtual items 172
and online interaction that occurred in concert with the traditional torch relay, the marketers engaged participants in a virtual torch relay, and injected freshness to this age-old marketing asset. The campaign turned Chinese consumers from mere viewers of the Games into more engaged consumers, and developed a stronger affinity towards and identification with the brand that could lead to long-term brand loyalty (Choi, 2008).
Virtual items are frequently used on social networking sites to interact with consumers; this also includes product placement in popular games such as Happy Farm. With the increasing penetration of mobile Internet, the real economy around virtual items in China now extends to mobile platforms. The culture of virtual items drives the growth of mobile value added services, and also promises opportunities to establish or enhance the relations between consumers and the brand through symbolic value. According to Stone Chen, marketing director of a major mobile community tx.com.cn, the virtual product placement was well received by users, and branded virtual products were preferred by users as gifts to non-branded ones. More importantly, mobile media can act as social devices and facilitate brand experience in hybrid space (de Souza e Silva, 2006), instead of in virtual space alone.
The following case study examines a marketing campaign launched by The North Face (TNF) in China, which leveraged the mobile check-in culture and virtual items. By encouraging participants to go out and explore urban space to claim a virtual piece of land on the map, the campaign teased out user-generated content and facilitated a communal brand experience in hybrid space. The mobile acted as the central tool and platform in content co-creation in location-based experience, as shown in the quadrant 4 of the Figure 2.
8.2 Campaign background
8.2.1 TNF: Challenges and opportunities in China
Founded in the U.S. in 1968, TNF is the brand named for the coldest, most unforgiving side of a mountain. Over more than 40 years, TNF has become well-known in the West as an explorer’s brand for outdoor and endurance sports. Never Stop Exploring is the line behind the outdoor gear and apparel giant. As stated in the
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company website: “We push the boundaries of innovation so that you can push the boundaries of exploration” (The North Face, 2010).
TNF is a company dedicated to innovation: it believes “success was going to the Urban Guerillas – those people who were faster, hungrier, more creative, and more innovative” (Klopp, 2006). Its continuous product innovation includes waterproof and breathable clothing, and the first geodesic tent (Klopp, 2006). To support its commitment to innovation, TNF has adopted five-step approach to innovation strategy: 1) holding long-range planning sessions every two years; 2) creating a culture that rewarded risk taking; 3) housing R&D and marketing in adjacent quarters; 4) establishing a corporate mantra: Strive for Differentiation; 5) Establishing strategic partnerships with key suppliers and outside sources (Klopp, 2006).
According to the Outdoor Industry Association of America (2006), over three quarters of Americans participate in active outdoor recreation each year, such as wildlife viewing, ice climbing, hiking and fishing. The active outdoor recreation economy contributes $730 billion annually to the U.S. economy. Quality gear is critical to a fulfilling outdoor experience, and Americans spend $46 billion each year on their equipment, apparel, footwear, accessories, and services.
Compared to the U.S., the outdoor industry only started to emerge in the late 1990s in China. Despite the short history, the outdoor products market has developed rapidly. According to Himfr.com (2008), one of China's leading B2B search platforms with more than 30 B2B industry websites to its name, China's outdoor clothing and equipment sales reached 260 million yuan (around 39 million USD), the figure was a mere 10 million yuan (around 1.5 million USD) five years before. Outdoor professional dealers grew from 400 in 2003 to 2,125 in 2007.
However, the primary dynamics driving growth in China – rapidly rising incomes and conspicuous consumption – are different from the forces that drove the U.S. industry in the last century (Outdoor Industry Association, 2010). Most modern Chinese have yet to adopt such a lifestyle. Common leisure activities include Internet surfing, Karaoke, dining out, and night clubs. Recent years have also witnessed the resurrection of the “physical” card and board games, such as Sanguosha (Killers of the Three Kingdoms); these are cheaper options, particularly among young people (W. T. Zhou & Peng, 2010). This also shows that people’s desire to connect with each other in 174
the physical world does not subside with the development of the virtual world. However, very few people participate in regular sports, let alone the more challenging outdoor sports. Executives in the outdoor industry have also noticed that they are hard pressed to find core outdoor enthusiasts behind the thousands of shops in China (Outdoor Industry Association, 2010).
Despite this, however, because of its large population, its booming economy, and its rich geological resources, analysts predict that China's outdoor market has enormous development potential, with market sale volume expected to reach close to 10 billion yuan (around 1.5 billion USD). The huge market potential has drawn overseas brands to China. TNF is one of them, entering the China market in 2000. While demonstrating potential, the outdoor products market remains an emerging niche market in China. Against this background, TNF sees China as a great challenge, and holds the belief that “everyone can be an adventurer, and as humans we should never stop exploring the natural world around us”. Therefore in the China market, the brand has adjusted its global positioning from “Never Stop Exploring” to “Start Exploring”.
In 2007, TNF branded business in China was acquired by the VF Corporation (NYSE: VFC), which underscored the latter’s commitment to long-term growth in the Asia-Pacific region. The brand also offered VF the opportunity to build a new category in outdoor sports in this dynamic market. In 2007, VF aimed to grow its business in China five-fold, reaching $40 million in revenues by 2012 (VF Corporation, 2007). To achieve the objective, it needed to grow the outdoor pursuits market, which accounted for just two percent of the total apparel market in China. Frank Cancelloni, general manager of the brand in Asia/Pacific, mentioned in a press interview:
We cannot focus all on the sales figures right now, as a lot of other well-known outdoor brands have not started to expand their business in China. There is limited market education right now, so we need to commit more to introducing the concept of outdoor activities here. ("VF acquires The North Face," 2007)
Within the niche market, TNF faced fierce competition from both international and local brands. It ranked fourth in terms of brand recognition. To support the business objective in China, TNF has been investing heavily in marketing campaigns in key cities in China. Brand-building initiatives are one of the efforts to drive business growth (VF Corporation, 2010). The strategy of encouraging outdoor participation is especially important internationally as the brand expands into markets with a less
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defined and developed outdoor culture such as China (VF Corporation, 2010, p. 17). Further, as the management stressed the importance of “pushing the limits of the new digital-media landscape” (VF Corporation, 2010, p. 20), it also had a positive impact on mobile marketing adoption.
8.2.2 Red Flag Campaign
The Red Flag Campaign was launched over 18 days from 15 October to 1 Nov 2009 in China. It aimed to encourage urban dwellers and Internet explorers to get outdoors and take the first step to “Start Exploring”, and to educate Chinese consumers that TNF is an outdoors sports brand, not a street fashion brand. The campaign aimed to reach out to a broad audience of Chinese urban consumers, their key target audience being between 18 and 24 years old; to inspire even non-outdoor enthusiasts to step out and venture into the unknown, and turn them into brand advocates.
The campaign was a contest to get everyone in China to use their mobile phones to plant virtual “Red Flags” with short messages to claim a virtual piece of China over 18 days. It was a fun and simple excuse for people to get outdoors. The iconic action of flag planting is an established event in the world of outdoor adventure, where an explorer lays claim to a summit by planting a flag, and continues to do so at every other summit he manages to conquer. In a race to see who would be the conqueror, a virtual map of China was gradually covered in a sea of red flags. During the campaign, the mobile acted as the central tool and platform for individual players to participate in the game, and also facilitated a communal experience for players in both the competition and collaborative mapping.
In this marketing campaign, the simple technology of SMS was leveraged to capture the latest “locative turn” of mobile media and deliver a fresh brand experience through integration with the culture of virtual items. At the time of the campaign, mobile check-in services were emerging in China, and early adopters were tech-savvy people who embraced the idea of tracing their footprint in life and who kept abreast of the latest technology. For TNF, however, these service providers could not deliver a wide enough target audience to communicate with. The simple technology of SMS was the ideal way to connect with more people and to engage them in the campaign. It enabled the brand to leverage the fresh idea and emerging culture of mobile check-in while also interacting with a wide range of potential consumers. 176
8.3 Mobile as a central tool & platform in content co-creation in location-based experience
In the location-based game experience, the mobile acted as a central tool and platform for content co-creation. Specifically, it acted as a central tool for location sharing and the interface of hybrid space; as a central tool and platform for a social network of competitors; and as a central tool and platform in collaborative mapping.
8.3.1 Mobile as a central tool for location sharing and interface of hybrid space
People simply needed to SMS their current location, their names, and the cities they were in to a service code in order to plant a virtual flag on a live dynamic map of China. On sending the SMS, people received a reply message from the brand, which included a username and a password to enable them to log on to the website www.thenorthface.com.cn/redflag or mobile site m.thenorthface.com.cn to check out the dynamic map and the flag-planting ranking list. They could also upload photos and share their feelings through comments. Each location could only be claimed by one person, and the location claimed could be named by the conqueror. Every flag planted increased the chances of winning TNF products or discounts.
In order to plant the virtual red flags on the map, participants had to actually go outdoors and check in at different places; therefore the portability of the mobile played an important role in the campaign. As people checked in at different locations, the power of “here and now” of the mobile phone gave people a taste of the great feeling of exploring a new place and claiming credit for being there first. The virtual red flags represented people’s footprint in the real world and also reflected their claim to the piece of land in the virtual world. The line between the real and virtual became blurred as people replicated their presence via their mobile, which acted as a tool for location sharing and the interface in the hybrid space (de Souza e Silva, 2006).
The race to plant virtual flags encouraged people to get out of their home and make a modest first step outdoors. Participants could plant virtual flags when they went to a nearby park, which is of course quite different from outdoor trips or sports. While tourists could participate in the campaign, perhaps while on an exploration trip, it was
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unlikely that they would respond to the brand’s call by bringing their luggage to travel to a distant place right away. People could plant virtual flags as they went, therefore integrating the game experience and the creation of the spatial-temporal data well into their everyday daily life. As the interface in the hybrid space, the mobile not only connected the game experience with the ordinary life by taking the game outside of the traditional magic circle, but it also encouraged people’s mobility (A. de Souza e Silva & Sutko, 2008). For an emerging market like China, the point was to not so much about where the exploration occurred but the fact that people had started going outdoors and experiencing the fun and thrills of claiming a piece of the map for being the first to arrive there. By using the mobile as the central tool and platform, as an interface in a hybrid space, and by integrating the game experience with everyday life, the brand owner encouraged more people to join the race, live and to spread the brand ethos.
Compared to the previous location-based marketing propositions based on monitoring, encouraging people to check in via their mobile is a fundamentally different approach. A typical example of location-based marketing is sending promotional offers via Bluetooth to people within a certain radius or proximity (Leek & Christodoulides, 2009). This kind of proximity marketing adopts a broadcasting approach in the hope of driving foot traffic to stores and realizing impulse purchases. However, that causes marketers’ concerns over privacy intrusion (Okazaki & Taylor, 2008), more specifically, regarding overuse and spam (Wilken & Sinclair, 2009b). In this campaign, people initiated the interaction with the brand, and thus had more control compared to the cases where they are targeted via Bluetooth and disturbed by interruptive sales messages, if they had their Bluetooth turned on at all. Compared to the sales-driven efforts in proximity marketing, the TNF campaign enabled a consumer experience in hybrid space through “self-positioning” (Benford et al., 2004) via the mobile interface.
8.3.2 The mobile as central tool and platform for a social network of competitors
While the mobile acted as the central tool for location sharing and as the interface of a hybrid space, it also acted as a platform to facilitate the formation of a social network of competitors who lived and shared the brand spirit.
As the race encouraged participants to check in at more places and try to be there first, they needed to keep up to date with the race. Owing to the portability and Internet 178
capability of the mobile phone, participants could view the live dynamic map and other flag-planters’ footprints on the road. Since one location could only be claimed by the first person checking in there, the participant would see the first “conqueror” if they came late. This injected a sense of urgency in the race. As they found out the place had already been claimed by someone else, the participants had to find somewhere else to plant their flags.
Based on the relative location to others, participants found competition intensity varied. For those who moved around in close proximity to one another, the competition was more intense. The search function by username allowed participants to trace the footprints of those who were in close proximity to them, and adjust their strategy against those nearby competitors in the race. The unpredictability contained in the race made it exciting as an unexpected playful experience (Hayles, 1999).
The search function by city and the function of zooming in and out enabled participants to gain knowledge of their local surroundings and beat others in the race. Location became one of the filters to help participants to acquire the most relevant information then and there. The search function by username allowed them to generate a map of their own or other participants’ footprints, and have an idea of the remaining territory in hybrid space. Therefore the mobile acted as a central tool and platform for participants as they go about in urban space in the race.
While geographically dispersed, participants experienced visual co-presence (Ito & Okabe, 2005) on the virtual dynamic map in the mobile mediated game. The red flags and the pictures on the map showed that they shared the same spirit and answered the call to go outdoors and start exploring. The ownership of the virtual land symbolized by the red flags also allowed participants to feel as if they were in hybrid space, where the line between the physical place and the virtual place blurred. As participants connected to the virtual map while moving around, they were also connected to others who were both remote and in the same contiguous space. Through this connection, participants were then encouraged by the “co-present” conquerors to continue their physical and virtual journey, and to win an advantage in the race.
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8.3.3 The mobile as central tool and platform in collaborative mapping
While people competed against each other to claim the virtual land, their location-sharing efforts also constituted a process of collaborative mapping. As user-generated spatiotemporal data represented by virtual red flags intersected with mapping, the meaning-making practices of checking in, naming, commenting in the process also gave meaning to the brand. Therefore people became value co-creators as they engaged themselves in real-time cartography in a journey of exploration, which was itself an annotation to the brand ethos.
As the location data from individual participants were aggregated, it constituted a dynamic user-generated map. The identity of cartographers, the search and zooming-in and out functions meant more agency and control for people, thus allowing them to perceive the environment as less mediated (Klein, 2003). Through temporal and spatial visualization of participants in the race, mobile media assumed an important role in facilitating the environment of dynamic map co-creation, customization, and sharing. Through user-generated spatiotemporal data and symbolic representation, the participants co-created a thematic map that embodied the brand’s ethos.
The shared value and codes of meaning embodied by the flag-planting led to the “emergence of collective identity” (Manuel Castells, Fernández-Ardèvol, Qiu, & Sey, 2006, p. 144) for the participants. It also established emotional connections among participants, and between participants and the brand. Further, as people planted virtual flags as they moved around, urban spaces were reconfigured (A. de Souza e Silva & Sutko, 2008). Those locations planted with virtual flags became fixed in the memory of participants who experienced the fun of outdoor exploration. In that sense, those locations gained a new layer of meaning for participants, especially the conquerors who claimed ownership of those locations. The map became a collective narrative and memory of co-creative experience, and personal versions of maps generated through search functions also became a record of individual footprints and personal memory. According to Castells (2000), space is the expression of society. This campaign was an initiative by TNF to inject an outdoor culture and exploring spirit among urban dwellers. As participants lived the brand ethos and interacted with each other via mobile, this brought them a new sense of places (Lemos, 2010), which turned into representations
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of the brand ethos.
8.4 Integration strategy
While the widely adopted SMS was simple and easy for people to participate, the campaign did not integrate it with existing location-based mobile social networks. This can be attributed to the small scale of such services at the time and the risk associated with privacy concerns. In the campaign, people could choose to be anonymous; as they may have been concerned of disclosing their identities to other location-based mobile services. While participants could browse the dynamic map that had red flags planted by others, and see photos and comments, they did not have an existing connection with each other. Without integration with the existing location-based mobile services, the campaign lacked a dimension of interaction between participants, and missed out on an opportunity to get the campaign message across to a wider audience through existing contacts in the mobile community.
The brand spread the campaign message and updated the campaign progress on Renren.com, a major social networking site in China, but that only remained at best a message board in this campaign. Users could only check in at different locations via SMS, and receive a username and password to log into the campaign site after that, rather than using their Renren accounts to check in. This granted users anonymity in the campaign, which dispelled their concerns about privacy and encourage more participation. As privacy is recognized as one of the thorny issues of mobile location-based services and mobile marketing (Evans, 2003), the anonymity embedded in the user name allowed by the brand via reply SMS got around the issue. Therefore the brand was very wary about the privacy issue as they treaded the field of mobile marketing, especially when dealing with users’ location information.
Despite that, the campaign delivered an integrated cross-media experience for users. It launched an outdoor photo sharing competition on www.lvren.cn, a leading community for outdoor sports and travel lovers in China. Community members share their outdoor experiences, offer travel tips, and exchange review of outdoor gear and equipment on the site. The online community also extends offline, when members organize outdoor trips themselves. In association with the TNF Red Flag Campaign, lvren users were encouraged to upload and share their photos of outdoor activities, and
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those whose photos were rated most popular by online users won the competition.
In addition to online and mobile marketing, the campaign covered in-store retail promotions, field marketing and live events in Beijing and Shanghai over the 18 days. People kept score on the event website and outdoor electronic board, where a live counter tracked the total number of flags planted across China, by individuals and by location. The synchronized counters online and in outdoor space enabled participants and pedestrians to follow the race. While participants could check in the mobile site with the assigned user name and password on the road; the outdoor electronic board passed the message of the campaign to pedestrians, and encouraged them to join in.
While the outdoor screen drove people to the mobile-mediated race, the mobile drove people to stores and events. Following two weeks of red flag planting in hybrid space, the on-ground events in Beijing and Shanghai brought people together to experience the fun of outdoor sports. Those who had previously participated in the flag-planting race received short message alerts, which drew them to the events. The 7-metre high climbing wall and a waving red flag called on people to try their hand. The mobile started a journey of exploration for people, and drove them to experience together the fun of outdoor sports.
There were also photo areas at the events, where background settings were all locations for outdoor exploration such as snow mountains, forests and deserts. People could take pictures with various background settings as if they were exploring different parts of the world, which could be as far as Antarctica. The opportunity to take photos with such backgrounds excited people as it appealed to the Chinese fascination for taking snapshots. A lot of people treasured such an opportunity and asked the TNF staff members to take photos of them. They were asked to wave a red flag with the TNF logo on it and pose for the photos. After the photos were taken, they were able to download them onto the campaign website or WAP site. People also captured moments of simulated experience of exploration with their mobile phones and shared photos with friends.
While the mobile played an important role in virtual flag planting, other media, such as outdoor screens, were used to drive people to the mobile platform. Meanwhile, the mobile continued to play an important role in driving participants to outdoor events, creating shared memories and igniting the passion for outdoor sports and natural world 182
exploration in an integrated campaign.
8.5 Campaign outcomes
The mobile-mediated game in hybrid space, combined with the culture of virtual items, delivered a successful campaign. In total, 651,540 flags were planted over the 18-day campaign period, beyond the expectation of 500,000 flags. The top ten flag planters planted an average of over 6000 flags.
The mobile media was well integrated with other media. On one hand, the online community and outdoor screens assumed a support role in spreading the campaign message and driving people to the mobile-mediated race. On the other hand, the mobile pulled participants back into the campaign for outdoor events, creating shared memories and igniting their passion for outdoor sports and natural world exploration. As the user profile of lvren website matched TNF’s potential consumer profile, people responded well to the photo-sharing activity, and the top winner garnered more than 130,000 votes (Lvren.cn, 2009). This also promoted awareness of the Red Flag Campaign and helped drive participation. Around 1.2 million people saw the live on-ground events in Beijing and Shanghai.
In an effort to adapt a global brand to meet the needs of the Chinese local market while preserving their core appeal, the mobile assumed an important role in the campaign to encourage people to go outdoors and start exploring. One of the frequently used marketing strategies for TNF is organizing sports challenges such as skiing, trail running and sponsoring expeditions to some of the most far-flung, still largely untouched corners of the globe. By involving people in outdoor sports, including professional athletes, the brand enhances its image among outdoor sports fans. The Red Flag campaign was, however, a quite different approach. It was much easier for average people to participate in: it did not require professional skills or equipment. Anyone with a mobile phone could take part in the campaign to plant a flag, live and spread the spirit of outdoor activities and never-ending exploration. While outdoor and endurance sports are still a distant concept for the average urban Chinese, the brand managed to promote brand awareness and spread the brand ethos among average people by lowering the barrier to participation.
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Different from field challenges and expedition sponsorships, this campaign extended the spirit of never-ending exploration beyond the hard-to-reach corners of the world, to hybrid space. The mobile acted as an interface in hybrid spaces which were connected, mobile and social (de Souza e Silva, 2006), as a central tool and a platform for location-sharing and collaborative mapping. By integrating the game experience with everyday life, the campaign also brought new meaning to the places in the cities in which people lived every day. As the campaign encouraged people’s mobility, participants also brought a new meaning to the places, which became the representations of the brand ethos.
Speaking of the role of the mobile media in this campaign, Joseph Tsang, Managing Director for Iconmobile in China, who was responsible for the mobile part the campaign, said,
Technology is not the driver but the enabler. To leverage the ubiquity of the mobile phone that integrates seamlessly into a well planned 360 degree campaign is the key to the success of any mobile marketing campaign. TNF Red Flag campaign showed a perfect match between brand image, technology and user behaviour making it a grand success (MMA, 2010).
The campaign delivered a positive impact on sales figures. During the 18 days, dealer store sales climbed 106%. The event coupon redemption was 150% above average, and generated an incremental 10.1 million RMB in sales.
8.6 Conclusion
In this campaign the objective was to encourage people to go outdoors and start exploring. Accordingly, the mobile played a central role as an interface in hybrid spaces to facilitate the brand experience. It acted as the central tool for individual participants to be a part of the campaign, and was also a platform for a communal experience in location-sharing and collaborative mapping. By encouraging people’s mobility in the mobile location-based game, the campaign delivered a fresh brand experience: participants lived and breathed the brand ethos in hybrid spaces. The process of generating geo-spatial data as participants moved around in cities was both a place-making and space-construction process and a brand value –creation process at the same time.
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While this case supports the argument that mobile technologies under the label of locative media and bottom-up process reinforce the hybridization of physical space and cyberspace and bring new senses of place and communities (Lemos, 2010), the virtual items also assume an important role here. Through the collective identity embodied in virtual red flags, participants were more emotionally connected with the brand, and among themselves. The symbolic meaning of generating the virtual items of red flags, when planted at different places, provided a new layer of meaning. The user-generated map with the spatiotemporal data became individual and collective narratives and memories that embodied the brand ethos. The integration of virtual items and mobile-mediated location-based activities present new possibilities for marketers.
While the mobile media assumed a central role in the campaign, it was well integrated with other media to achieve the marketing objective. The dynamics between mobile media and other media helped to drive participation and extend online interactions to the physical world. The well-integrated campaign also showed that the line between the digital and the physical is blurring: this presents new opportunities for marketers. As Wind and Mahajan suggested (2002), to meet the new realities of the converging consumer, who move between real and virtual worlds, companies need to create convergence of their own marketing approaches, joining old and new, online and offline. Mobile media, when integrated with other media and acting as the interface of hybrid spaces, can enhance the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. Mobile media’s ubiquity, multi-functionality, and the capability to act as the interface in hybrid space, a tool and a platform, when integrated with other media, present new possibilities for marketers. However, privacy is still an issue in location-based mobile activities, and marketers need to tread carefully.
While the participants competed against each other and engaged in the collaborative mapping, they acted on their own to generate temporal-spatial data, which then automatically generated the dynamic virtual map. The next section will look at a campaign that brought geographically dispersed participants together for urban exploration and content co-creation in a mobile-mediated field game.
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Chapter 9 Nokia Fusion Challenge Campaign
This chapter examines the Nokia Fusion Challenge Campaign in 2008, where the mobile media acted as the central tool and platform in location-based experience, as shown in quadrant 4 of Figure 2. While the mobile acted as the central tool and platform in The North Face Red flag Campaign (See Chapter 8) to engage the Chinese consumers and encourage them to embrace an outdoor lifestyle, there was no physical interaction among participants. The Nokia Fusion Challenge Campaign facilitated more user interaction, and demonstrated the role of mobile media in the dynamics of the communities in hybrid spaces. Environment Virtual Space Hybrid Space
Centrality of mobile Supplementary role Central role media Content CGC Supplementary content Central narrative device & delivery/customization tool tool in content (individual consumption experience) Nokia E63 Campaign 1 Nokia Supernova Campaign 2
UGC Supplementary tool & Central tool & platform in platform for content location-based experience (communal presumption experience) Clean & Clear Clear Fairness TNF Virtual Red Flag Campaign 3 Nokia Fusion Challenge 4 FIGURE 2 Matrix of mobile-mediated co-creation brand experiences.
9.1 Introduction
Urban spaces in China have been created and recreated with the country’s rapid urbanization process. Against such a background, mobile and location technologies have had a significant impact on how people interact with each other, and the way they understand and use urban space in China.
The rapid urbanization process in China, especially since the economic reforms began in 1978, has had deep implications for people’s lives and their understanding and experience of urban space. This is particularly evident in the eastern costal area, though other regions also witnessed urbanization, but at a slower pace (L. Zhang & Han, 2009).
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Accompanying the urbanization process is the massive demolition of historic factories and traditional courtyard residences (hutongs) and the reconstruction of urban space, which has witnessed changes in traditional ways of life (R. Zhou, 2006). The transition from rural to urban economy was accompanied by a rapid growth of urban population. China’s urban population reached 622 million by the end of 2009, becoming the largest urban population in the world (The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, 2010). The urbanization rate stood at nearly 47%, and is estimated to reach 50% by 2015. Among the large population of migrants is the floating population, who are “temporary” residents, without possession of the proper Hukou, an official permanent resident permit given by the government. According to the National Population and Family Planning Commission (NPFPC) (2010), China's floating population of migrant workers reached a record 211 million in 2009 and is estimated to reach 350 million by 2050. These new urban dwellers face a new urban environment to explore and experience, and the rapid infrastructure development also challenges people to rediscover the cities they have been living in.
Further, the Internet and mobile technologies are affecting the ways in which people interact with each other, and the way they use and understand urban space in China. According to Dan, Doulet, and Keane (2009), over the past two decades, China has witnessed a reconstruction of communities, and sociability is opening from small social circles, such as family and close friends, to larger self-designed “small worlds” based on common interests, such as car clubs and travelling enthusiasts. They argue that online communities serve a significant link between online and offline activities, a bridge “from collective sociality to collaborative spatiality (p. 387).”
The multifunctional mobile media, in convergence with location technologies, provides opportunities for a fresh experience of urban exploration. In the Nokia Fusion Challenge Campaign, marketers engaged consumers in exploring and rediscovering urban space through the lens of mobile media and the mobile mediated task-driven games in urban space. It also offered opportunities for marketers to engage consumers in a co-creation experience in hybrid space. In the campaign, as consumers explored the urban space, they connected with each other through photo-sharing, collaborative content production, and mobile mediated location-based games. The mobile was the central tool and platform for the experience of “collaborative spatiality” (Dan, et al., 2009, p. 387), and facilitated dynamics of communities in hybrid spaces.
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9.2 Campaign background
9.2.1 Campaign product and market situation The campaign product Nokia N78, nicknamed “New Fusion”, is an “all-in-one” mobile device. In addition to elementary features such as voice, SMS, and MMS, it also comes with a 3.2 Megapixel camera, A-GPS, and web surfing capabilities. As the very first N-series device in 2008, it was seen as the evolution of N73, the new generation of “street device” (Jie Ji), and the main force to drive sales in 2008 for Nokia.
The functional appeal of N78 targeted function-oriented consumers, who are urban residents, mainly male, aged between 20 and 35, with a certain consumption power. In terms of mobile usage, they are more sophisticated users of mobile applications and use mobile Internet more than others. The N78 enabled users to “search and find places and know how to get there, with integrated A-GPS; tag images automatically with capture location and upload directly to the web; and access the web over wireless LAN (WLAN) with automatic hotspot authentication” (Nokia Inc., 2008d). Another major target consumer group, secondary to function-oriented consumers, was women attracted to the N78’s fashionable design, especially the white model.
At the time of the product launch, Nokia faced a tough device market. As mobile phones have become an everyday tool for consumers, more and more functions have become standard features, including photos, videos, music, WAP, and GPS (CCID, 2009). Increasing homogeneity in product functions made it hard to stand out from competitors. Some device manufacturers tried to upgrade features, such as increasing memory size and camera pixels. Some mobile phones have a memory as large as 16G and others come with an 800-pixel camera. Due to fierce competition and price wars in the mobile device market, profit margins were going down. Growth had lost its power at the beginning of 2008, with the increased rate of shipment slowing from 17.38% in Q4 2007 to 4.02%, and sales revenue from 15.6% to 7.22% (CCID, 2008b). Further, the global financial crisis was expected to give mobile phone manufacturers an even more difficult time. Without educating users about brand personality and value, it would be hard to achieve effective differentiation with the geometric growth in product. Against such a background, it was important for mobile device manufacturers to focus on value propositions for consumers.
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Adding to the challenges for traditional mobile phone manufacturers was the global launch of the iPhone in 2007. It demonstrated a strong adaptation of the mobile phone for the Internet, exerted a great impact on mobile culture, and led to various efforts to copy, clone, and cope with its success (Goggin, 2009). While the higher price and the lack of WiFi feature resulted in a lukewarm reception in China (Chao, 2009), more than 2 million Chinese people had already purchased it on the grey market before the official launch in the local market (Hille, 2009).
While Apple hit the mobile market with Schumpeterian power, Nokia actually had a similar strategic vision of the future. Back in 2006, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, the CEO of Nokia at that time, described the unique opportunity Nokia had to mobilize the Internet for the mass market. He addressed the Nokia Capital Market Days 2006 saying, “With an estimated 850 million Nokia device users out there, we are positioned to connect more people to the Internet than any other company in the world. We are actively aligning our strategy in pursuit of this major business opportunity” (Nokia Inc., 2006). Since then, the strategic focus on consumer mobile Internet service has seen more emphasis coming from within the company. In May 2008, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo announced at their annual stockholder meeting that they wanted to shift to the Internet business as a whole. He said, “Companies such as Apple, Google and Microsoft are not our traditional competitors, but they are major forces that must be reckoned with… our goal is to act less like a traditional manufacturer, and more like an Internet company” (Kallasvuo, 2008).
The launch of the N78 in China came at a time when Nokia was stressing its strategy to shift to an Internet company, therefore the importance of the N78 for Nokia was more than just another device, but a demonstration of its strategy to deliver consumer mobile Internet experience via the converged device. Meanwhile, market competition challenged marketers to deliver innovative campaigns. As Xu Yiwei, the marketing director of Nokia Greater China, Japan and Korea, said, “We always ask ourselves where innovation is in marketing solutions. This is especially important in today’s market, particularly in China, where we find mobile phones are like fast moving consumer goods” (IT.com.cn, 2009).
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9.2.2 Campaign objectives and process The campaign spanned the period from 20 June 2008 to 2 August 2008. Its objectives were: 1) to educate mass target consumers about the product; 2) to enable core users to experience product features and enhance the product image of the “all-in-one” device. Through the campaign, as David Tang, the Vice President at that time, revealed, Nokia wanted to “encourage people to explore the unknown in the familiar, and spread the spirit of exploration among strangers through multiple functions afforded by N78” (Nokia Inc., 2008g). According to Brian Zhai from the mobile marketing specialist agency (2010), it was easier to communicate with marketers at Nokia than other marketers from firms. In fact, they had their idea of how mobile marketing could be leveraged to achieve their communication goals. When communicating with the agency MMX China, marketers at Nokia required that participants shall use the mobile as much as possible in the campaign, rather than using a PC. The “no PC” solution offered by the agency and the unique role of the mobile device in the game satisfied marketers as it communicated across the “all-in-one” message.
The campaign was designed around a nationwide relay field task. Advertising was used to generate public awareness, with media purchased on selected mobile sites in addition to traditional media to reach more of the target audience. Mobile portals, including wap.monternet.com, Kong.net and Sina.cn, were chosen because of their wider reach, which accounted for 70% of the mobile advertising budget. Monternet, the operator portal, has a large number of mid-to-high income users at its news channel. Kong.net users are young and fashionable, and most of them are male users owing to the site’s status as the official mobile website partner with both NBA (National Basketball Association) and CBA (Chinese Basketball Association). With a large number of channels under it, Sina was good for user segmentation. In addition, its users’ relatively strong purchasing power matched the target user profile. The rest of the budget was allocated to mobile sites 3g.cn, mobile.msn.com.cn, and MMX China mobile ad network for precision targeting at target consumers. 3g.cn users are sophisticated mobile users in the mobile community. MSN users are fashionable white collar workers, who are also sophisticated mobile users as they are mobile client software users. The MMX China mobile ad network aggregated the first and second class mobile media based on the CPC model, which gave the marketers a clearer return on investment.
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In the phase of calling for participants, people could register their interest by submitting a picture of a fashion landmark in the city and uploading it to the website www.myn78.com.cn or WAP site www.myn78.mobi, or simply by sending it to a service code via MMS. A submission needed to include the picture as well as the name of the city and the location of the landmark. Registrations of mobiles were kept in sync with Internet registration via PC. The easiness of participation in the campaign was the key to attracting a large number of people. In the first phase of the competition, individual relay players were picked randomly among those who opted in throughout the country, and were briefed by Nokia staff about their tasks in local cities. The individual participants needed to use a multifunctional N78 allocated to them to complete a particular task of exploring the local city, and then randomly choose the next player in another city.
Following the individual competition, sixty players from twenty cities entered the semi-final in ten teams of six players. The fastest three teams to complete the tasks, and a revival team composed of six players in the remaining teams with the most support among people online, entered the final in Shanghai. These players met face-to-face for the first time at the final and engaged in field exploration tasks and creative challenges of mobile film production. The mechanism of the team setup was borrowed from the idea of “six degrees of separation”, which was put forward in the 1950s after an innovative experiment showing that six intermediaries is the average distance between any two people in the United States. Several other experiments were conducted via email (Dodds, Muhamad, & Watts, 2003), on Microsoft Messenger (Leskovec & Horvitz, 2007), on Facebook, and on Twitter (Cheng, 2010) to test the theory in the online world. While the results varied, they proved that the theory of six degrees of separation roughly held true for the virtual world, and the distance was smaller within harmonious social networking sites. Although the theory was dismissed as an “academic urban myth”(Kleinfield, 2002) due to inconclusive evidence, the embodied idea of a small world matched one of the campaign objectives to spread the spirit of exploration among strangers via the mobile.
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9.3 Mobile as a supplementary tool and platform for photo-sharing
In addition to the PC, the mobile was a supplementary tool for people to register their interest in participating in the relay game either on the mobile campaign site or using MMS. As the participants did so, it was a journey of exploration and rediscovery for them. The mobile became a platform for participants to share their photos and perspectives with each other. For those submitting the photos via MMS, the participant would receive a username and password to access the campaign site, where a personal space was automatically generated to store the photos. For each photo, the participant received reward points as an incentive. In addition, the features of “add as friend” and commenting on the campaign sites also allowed participants to interact with each other around the uploaded photos. The mobile constructed an environment in which geographically distributed participants negotiated the meaning of fashion landmarks in different cities, shared their perspectives, and spread the spirit of exploration as they walked in the cities and shared the photos on-the-go. The user generated content and user interaction via mobile as an interface of the hybrid space constituted a collective place-making and space-constructing experience.
The affordances of perpetual contact (J. E. Katz & Aakhus, 2002) via mobile media renders the less photographic and communication-worthy aspects of mundane life communicable (Koskinen, 2007), and provides an antidote in an age of highly edited and photo-shopped images (Hjorth, 2008, p. 95). While one of the dominant features of mobile media, such as camera phones, was what Koskinen characterized as “the aesthetics of banality” (2007), Ito and Okabe (2005) argued that the three “s”—sharing, storing, and saving—of camera phone images, is pivotal in locating meanings. Previous research has also emphasized the significance of the context in which mobile photos are shared (or not) (Ito & Okabe, 2005; Scifo, 2005).
In this campaign, people could capture the photos on their way to the fashion landmarks, and also take their time to look for new landmarks in the cities. Therefore the process of taking photos of the fashion landmarks was also one of documenting their movements in life, sharing their understanding of the city, as well as discovering new things in the familiar urban space. By uploading photos and the name of the city and the landmark, people gave others virtual access to the places in the photos. The
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visual “co-presence” (Ito & Okabe, 2005) specific to the ubiquitous mobile devices and supported by photo sharing practice created a space for participants to explore foreign places and to rediscover familiar localities.
As the interface of the hybrid space, the mobile encouraged people’s mobility while connecting the game experience with ordinary life (A. de Souza e Silva & Sutko, 2008). As participants shared photos on-the-go, the mundane and familiar fashion landmarks of their cities travelled through mobile media and turned into a fresh scene for others. For those in the same city, the participants negotiated the meaning of fashion landmarks and rediscovered the urban space. For those in different cities, the photos of the fashion landmarks opened a window to foreign cities. The banal for some people turned into a fresh scene for others. As people walked in cities, user-generated geomobile content transformed the experience of navigating, not just unfamiliar spaces but also familiar spaces (Crawford & Goggin, 2009). As the campaign sites allowed participants to search, browse, and save the photos, they pieced together the photos into bigger pictures of the cities. Through the new technology for perception (Koskinen, 2007, p. 61), people discovered, reviewed, or updated their perception of the cities and shared them with others.
Meanwhile, the mobile built connections among geographically dispersed participants, who shared their viewpoints and experiences regarding the theme of fashion landmarks. The photos revealed participants’ understanding of the places and the cities, and also their bonds with the places. As people shared, stored and saved the photos, it became a conversation between those who uploaded the photos and those who viewed and downloaded them. In addition, the increasing mobility of people also added to the fabric of the narrative. Those who were born in these cities and those who were new to the cities all shared their voices and negotiated the meaning of the fashion landmarks in their cities. This was particularly relevant in contemporary China where there is a large population of migrant workers, and where the mobile phone plays an important role in their social life as they relocate to other cities (P. Law, 2007; P. L. Law & Peng, 2008; Qiu, 2009). The mobile facilitated an environment of juxtaposing local and foreign perspectives in the mobile society, an environment of knowledge sharing through “the wisdom of the crowds” (Surowiecki, 2005).
In addition, the individual uploads were aggregated into a thematic map of fashion landmarks in different cities on the campaign sites. This was similar to the TNF Red 193
Flag Campaign, where participants documented their traces as they explored the urban space, and collaboratively generated a map representing the brand ethos (See Section 6.2). More importantly, by leveraging “collective intelligence” (Lévy, 1997), the theme around the fashion landmarks connected geographically dispersed participants, who could interact with each other and share knowledge and perspectives. The user generated streams of photos became the city guides to fashion landmarks, and the participants became tourists and tourist guides of the cities at the same time. In this process, mobile photos, a form of mobile multimedia, “re-territorialized” experiences and communication (Koskinen, 2007). The mobile facilitated a collaborative place-making and space-constructing experience.
Therefore, while serving as a supplementary tool for game registration, the mobile also provided an environment in which users explored or rediscovered the cities through uploaded photos, and interacted with other participants. Meanwhile, the banality of everyday life became communicable, and turned into a fresh perspective and experience. As the geographically dispersed yet connected participants walked through the cities, the mobile provided an experience of meaning negotiation, promoted plural views, and facilitated collaborative spatiality in the “portable community” (Chayko, 2007). This also paved the way for the later stage of the campaign, where the geographically dispersed individual participants met in real life and became team mates in field games.
9.4 Mobile as the central tool in task-driven games
The experience of urban exploration extended further, to the field task competition, where participants had the opportunity to use the N78 device. To convey the value proposition of an “all-in-one” mobile phone, Nokia designed the campaign so that users needed to use N78 devices to complete various tasks in the competition, and to pick their team mates in the relay. The central role of the mobile device in the game experience was important in achieving the campaign objectives: to enable participants to experience the product features and to enhance the product image as an “all-in-one” device.
During the first phase of the individual relay competition, the mobile specialist agency MMX China designed a mobile application for players. The mechanism was as follows: first, a player needed to enter the player number and select the city he/she was in. Then, a screen with three rolling columns appeared. Columns A, B and C 194
represented three tasks, and in each column there were different tasks, such as A1, A2, etc. The player needed to press key “5” to stop the rolling columns, and when it stopped, the player would know which tasks needed to be completed. For example, when the rolling stopped at A1, B11 and C19, corresponding tasks would appear on the screen.
The tasks were designed to enable users to experience the N78’s multiple usages and convey the message of an “all-in-one” device. For example, one task was to find a construction completed in 2008 and take a photo of it. Participants could experience the product features of mobile Internet, navigation, and A-GPS when completing this task. In addition, it was also an opportunity to elevate the product awareness through interaction between the players and passers-by. Examples of such tasks included finding a person on the street who could name four functions of the N78; and finding three people on the street to transfer one of the songs on their mobile to the N78. By deliberately involving people on the street in the game, the campaign facilitated interaction between players and non-players, and integrated the game experience with ordinary life. When the player completed the tasks, he/she could randomly pick the next player on the screen. With the functions of selecting tasks, picking the next relay player, and completing tasks, the mobile was an important tool in this phase.
The top sixty players from twenty cities entered the semi-final, where they formed ten teams of six. The competition started simultaneously at 10am in different cities, and the teams who completed their tasks the quickest won a place in the final. Ten teams needed to find a landmark beginning with the word allocated to them, and the relay players in the same team needed to find a landmark beginning with the last word of the previous landmark’s name. Meanwhile they also had to complete tasks assigned by a local Nokia employee. All teams received one N78 device and a certain amount of money for transport. While the players formed a team, they completed tasks in relay in different cities, and were still on their own at this stage.
As the players reported, it was not easy to complete the assigned tasks, even for a local in the city. It turned out that some players more or less followed a routine in their daily lives, therefore were unfamiliar with other parts of the city. Further, the rapid urban development in China added to the challenges. In this case of unpredictability, mobile Internet and navigation came to the players’ rescue. Some players shared their experience (Nokia Inc., 2008e):
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Dalian has been developing very fast these years. Even I, a native here, do not know some new landmarks here. (Wang Jiaxiang, male, 22, freelancer, Dalian)
It was harder to complete the tasks than I imagined. It’s impossible to know every detail about such a big city. There’s always something you are not familiar with. It’s not easy to find the bar with “N” in its name. We used GPS to find our way at last. (Zhao yong, male, 26, quality engineer, Qingdao)
Navigation and geo-tagging are the two functions which helped a lot during the competition. (Susan, female, 26, HR manager, Beijing)
For Yu Bin (28, female, sales director) and Li Xin (28, female, sales director) in Xi’an, one of their tasks was to take photos of two restaurants with “No. 78” in their addresses. When Yu Bin and Li Xin found a restaurant using GPS, they decided to take a bus to get there. When they came to the restaurant, they found there was no address on the door and were very upset. As Yu (cited in Nokia Inc., 2008f) said, “How can such as a famous restaurant have no address plate?” They then approached an attendant, and asked her the address of the restaurant. The attendant said it was No. 78, Dong Guan Zhen Street, and the address tag may have fallen off during renovation. They finally found written evidence of the address on a business license on the wall. The same thing happened when they arrived at the second restaurant. It was not unusual for there to be no address plate for buildings there. Without using the GPS function, they may have missed the restaurants.
Sun Yi from Qingdao had a similar experience during the competition. When she was asked to find a place beginning with the word “Dao”, the first place that came to her mind was “Dao Xiang Cun”, a time-honoured snack brand in China. To find the best route to the place, Sun did a search, but found no landmark online. She went online to double check the store was still there, only to find it was demolished. Then, she searched online and found another place beginning with the word “Dao”. In this case, the mobile guided the player through the competition when the rapid urban development rendered her knowledge outdated (Nokia Inc., 2008b).
When the urban space was used as the game board (de Souza e Silva, 2006), the campaign facilitated interaction between participants in the game space and non-participants in their ordinary routine in urban space. By involving other people in the urban space, such as passers-by on the street or customers in Nokia shops, marketers blurred the line between the campaign and everyday life, the game space and the usual urban space. Several tasks were designed so that game players needed to ask
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for support from non-players in the urban space. As the campaign facilitated interaction between players and non-players, it enriched the game experience, facilitated product experience for more people, and augmented the campaign message.
For example, two of the tasks assigned to Yu Bin (28, female, sales director) and her partner Li Xin (28, female, sales director) from Xi’an were: 1) find two people on the street who know the music played on the N78 and take photos of them; 2) find two people on the street who can spell Nokia NSeries’ correctly and take photos of them. When Yu Bin and Li Xin found a restaurant using GPS, they decided to take a bus to get there. On the bus, they decided to complete these two tasks. They approached a passenger and explained they needed his cooperation in completing their tasks in a Nokia campaign, and the passenger willingly agreed to help them. As Yu and Li played a song on the N78, it attracted the attention of other passengers in the bus. The passenger got the correct name of the song, and the game players were very happy and appreciated her help. They took a photo of themselves together as a proof of the task completion, as well as a souvenir.
However, it was not always as easy to acquire support from passers-by. When Yu and Li got off the bus, they tried to approach two female passers-by on the street. One of them was a middle-aged woman, and the other looked younger. Both women were quite nervous when approached by the strangers, particularly when they saw the camera crew from the Travel Channel. The middle-aged woman immediately said, “Don’t put the camera on me.” Then Yu explained their purpose, and played a song on the mobile. The younger woman immediately said she knew the song. It turned out she was right. They were all very happy that they had completed the task together. As they were going to take photos of themselves, the younger woman asked her friend to join her. As the players could not foresee who they were going to meet or what would happen, it added to the unpredictability of the game experience. This unpredictability in public spaces was referred to by Lehtonen and Mäenpää (1997) as “street sociability”, which is “the particular public form of sociality, of being at once both interested and yet indifferent and anonymous” (p. 156).
The mobile was the central tool in the task-oriented field games. When using it to complete their tasks while exploring the urban space, the players had the opportunity to experience the multifunctional mobile device. By engaging non-players in the game, the campaign facilitated interaction between participants and non-participants, and 197
connected brand experience and everyday life. The game created an imaginary playful layer that merged with the urban space (de Souza e Silva, 2006). Further, the unpredictability led to a richer game experience. More importantly, as participants and non-participants interacted with each other with the mobile as the central tool in the game, it augmented the campaign message, enhanced product awareness, and appealed to a wider audience.
9.5 Mobile as central tool in collaborative exploration and storytelling of a city
After the preliminary round and semi-finals, the campaign brought the final entrants together in Shanghai on 2 August and created an environment for “collaborative spatiality” (Dan, et al., 2009) in the physical world. The previously geographically dispersed online community was reconfigured and moved to a real urban space. According to Brian Zhai, this was the first time a mobile brand had conducted a nation-wide campaign connecting online and offline experiences in China. As the participants competed as teams in the physical world, the mobile continued to be the key tool in task completion, facilitating the teams’ “micro-coordination” (Ling, 2004) and content co-creation as they explored the urban space.
At the beginning of the game, all of the final entrants gathered at the Nokia Flagship Store, where the store manager, Zhu Wen, assigned N78 devices and task briefing cards to the teams. Each team was required to use the N78 to make a film about Shanghai, where players would act as directors, producers, screenwriters, and actors and actresses. To get their separate themes and background music for the films, the four teams were required to go to the designated places mentioned in the task briefing card to find an LCD Nokia logo based on the clues on the card, take a photo of it and send it to a designated service code via MMS to receive a 2D bar code in return. Then, they were required to return to the Nokia flagship store and scan the 2D barcode using special equipment, which through automatic recognition would tell if the teams had got the right photos. If so, the teams would get the elements they needed for the film production via Bluetooth, including film themes and background music. Then, they needed to use the N78 to capture photos or short videos before going to The Bridge 8, a creative industries landmark in Shanghai, to edit the film.
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As all the team members were engaged in the game, from racing through the challenges to acquire film themes and creative elements to capturing photos and videos, the mobile was the key tool in completing the field tasks. This was similar to the previous relay competition. The mobile actually became a seventh team member who came to the teams’ rescue with features such as A-GPS, free maps, voice navigation, and video positioning. For example, as most of the players came from other parts of the country, they found the navigation function of the mobile phone very handy in the competition. This helped to raise users’ awareness of the device’s powerful capabilities through their experience.
In addition, the mobile played an important role in terms of how team members coordinated with each other to move through the urban space, complete the tasks and reach the destinations. All teams decided to go separate ways and complete different tasks while coordinating with each other via N78. In these cases, the mobile became a micro-coordination tool (Ling, 2004). For example, to save time, two members of Team 1 waited at the Nokia Flagship Store for their other team members to send the photo via MMS to verify it and get the film themes and background music. After they acquired the video theme, which was “Perhaps Love”, they decided to go their separate ways to the Shanghai Botanic Garden and Xu Jia Hui commercial and leisure area to capture photos and videos. The mobile was a central tool for the team mates to coordinate their activities in the game, update their progress, or discuss the next steps.
The mobile was also a central tool for micro-coordination in the case of unexpected situations, which occurred quite frequently. For example, after Pan and another team member from Team 3 found the Nokia LCD advertising board at a bus stop, took a photo of it and sent an MMS to their team mates to get the 2D barcode for the film theme and background music, the LCD rolled on and displayed pictures of food which led them astray. They forgot about the game rule and thought the film theme was food, and passed the wrong message to their team mates before going on to take photos and videos for the film. It was only when the other two team members received their film theme via 2D bar code that they realized their assigned theme was “At the Crossroads”. They immediately used the mobile to call Pan and the other team member to tell them. Through micro-coordination, the mobile provided flexibility to adjust team strategy, and they avoided shooting a film based on the wrong theme.
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In addition, the mobile was the central tool for facilitating content co-creation in the urban space. The participants used the mobile phones to capture photos and videos of the mundane city life for the film. As they travelled through the city to produce their films, the rich texture of the urban space found its way into the creative work. The buildings, inhabitants, scenes and cultures in the city all informed the digital content creation. As the participants engaged in collaborative mobile film production in a journey combining treasure-hunting in the urban space, and turned what they discovered or encountered into digital content, the mobile facilitated the experience in the hybrid space. By encouraging people’s mobility, the campaign allowed the participants to capture the vivid and dynamic urban space and city life instead of narrowing their focus on isolated coordinates. Therefore, the mobile was a tool for both collaborative content creation and collaborative spatiality in hybrid space.
9.6 User-generated content
While the participants engaged in collaborative film-making, user-generated content went beyond expressive creation. Their performance in the competition also became the user-generated content for a TV program. The competition was videoed and broadcast by Travel Channel China, a leading nationwide television channel for travel information throughout the country. The channel covers all 31 provinces with an audience of over 300 million in China. The competition thus became a reality TV show and conveyed the campaign message to a wider audience. The programs were also available on video sharing sites such as Youku and Tudou. As TV production of the competition went on air and travelled in online video sites, the players’ performance in the game became user-generated content for the marketing narrative.
As Andrejevic (2003) argued, reality TV enacts the role of surveillance in transforming leisure time and domestic activities into a form of value-generating labour. In this campaign, both participants and non-participants became value co-creators in the game experience. It also demonstrated the de-differentiation of the border between content and advertising (Andrejevic, 2003). One of the cited examples was the phenomenally successful reality show Survivor, which shows that the format of reality TV helps to merge advertising and content by allowing sponsor products to be included in the show’s narrative. In this campaign, under the surveillance of the participants, all activities with the N78 as the central enabling tool were both user-generated content
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and a form of advertising. The journey of exploring and rediscovering the city, the interaction among participants, the “street sociability” (Lehtonen & Mäenpää, 1997) between participants and non-participants, as well as the content co-creation all became the marketing narrative that emphasized the role of the mobile as an “all-in-one” device in everyday life, and people’s encounter with urban space.
In addition, as the players were selected on a competitive basis during the individual relays and semi-finals, and the final entrants had higher levels of mobile media literacy, they actually became the champion of the N78 device, a central tool throughout the game. They also became the spokespersons of the mobile lifestyle. For example, when a player shared their product experience of the mobile device and the importance of its role in the game, it not only built product awareness but also enhanced product appeal through consumer testimony. Therefore the participants co-created the marketing narrative as their consumption of space in the game doubled as the production of the marketing narrative. The user-generated content had an augmented and continuous effect as the marketing narrative when travelling from TV to online video sites.
By incorporating the mobile into the game experience, assigning it a starring role and by turning the game into a reality TV show, the campaign witnessed a blurred line between content and advertising. Participants became value co-creators as they used the mobile as a key tool to complete tasks and produce films about the city, and gave their testimonies about the product. The non-participants also had a role in value co-creation as they became unexpectedly involved in the game.
9.7 Campaign outcomes
The campaign successfully raised brand and product awareness. According to the monthly report released by PDC (2008), a consumer survey centre under the major consumer electronics products information portal www.pconline.com, the N78 climbed from 9th place in June to 3rd place in July in consumer attention.
Mobile media supplemented traditional media in advertising to generate public awareness about the campaign. According to statistics from WAP based Nielson Net Ratings, the mobile media generated 15,000,000 ad impressions, 1,562,622 clicks, and the CPC was 0.29 RMB. There were 1,350,500 unique visitors to the mobile campaign
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site, which generated 1,612,050 landing page impressions. The selected mobile sites helped to spread the campaign message to a wider audience while also engaging the target consumers in a cost-efficient way.
Mobile media was also important in driving participation. Registered users reached 89,670 at the mobile site, and 22,124 photos were uploaded at the mobile site from 162 cities. In addition, more than 120,000 registrations were done via mobile MMS due to its convenience, and the cost per registration was less than 17% of that via PC.
The mobile acted as the tool for game registration, task completion, urban exploration, and content co-creation. It also acted as an interface of the hybrid environment, where participants interacted with the brand, and each other, in place-making and space construction. The embedding of the mobile phone in the field games in everyday urban space enabled participants and other urban dwellers to see the value of the multi-functionality of the mobile device in urban exploration, and introduced them to the mobile lifestyle in urban space. Overall, as the marketers had hoped, the campaign message spread across the target consumers. As one of the judges of the mobile films in the final said, “This was a very creative campaign, and I can really feel the message of all-in-one device” (Nokia Inc., 2008g).
By producing a reality TV show of the game, the campaign not only enabled core target users to experience the product features, but also educated mass target consumers about the product. All of the game experience, interaction among participants and non-participants, co-created content, and consumer testimonies about the product became the marketing narrative. Consumers became important value co-creators as they became engaged in the campaign. The availability of the program at online video sites extended the campaign message to a wider audience and with a continuous impact.
9.8 Conclusion
In the Nokia Fusion Challenge campaign, the mobile played an important role in achieving the objective of educating mass target consumers about the product, enabling product experience for core users, and enhancing the product image of an “all-in-one” device. At the initial stage, advertising on mobile media with both wide reach and precision targeting helped to promoted awareness of the campaign. The game registration through photo sharing via MMS or mobile Internet encouraged
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participation. As the game progressed, more sophisticated applications and technologies were introduced to cater to the higher levels of technological literacy and competence of the players. This not only facilitated product experience for core target consumers, but also exposed them to the less known mobile technologies and showed their potential use, educating them about a more sophisticated mobile lifestyle.
As a supplementary tool and platform in game registration, the mobile enlisted wide participation from the mass target consumer group via photo sharing, and constructed a “portable community” (Chayko, 2007). The mobile, as the interface of the hybrid space, facilitated a collective experience where people were geographically dispersed but present in the shared space.
Through the relay game of task completions in urban exploration, the campaign continued to deliver a sustainable experience by facilitating physical interactions among the “portable community” (Chayko, 2007). This demonstrated the changing nature of collectivity in China, whereby increased mobility challenges traditional forms of sociability, especially those related to the notion of proximity (Davis, 1995).
While some studies suggest that mobile phones withdraw users from physical space (Gergen, 2002; Puro, 2002), the photo-sharing during the opt-in period and the field game experience constructed a narrative of places, shaped people’s perceptions, and enabled a journey of discovery and rediscovery. By spreading the spirit of exploration among strangers, and by brining geographically dispersed participants to one city for physical interactions, the marketers used the mobile as the central tool in the hybrid space to bring people out of what Habuchi (2005, p. 167) referred to as the “tele-cocoon”. The brand experience was a meaning-negotiation process around place and urban space, and, more importantly, was embedded in people’s mobility and the journey of urban exploration.
The mobile was the central tool not only in task completion and team coordination in the field game, but also in content co-creation. As participants engaged in the mobile film co-production in the urban space, the rich texture of the urban space found its way into the creative work through the buildings, the inhabitants, and the scenes and cultures of the city. By enabling participants to weave their mobility into their creative content, the campaign enabled a lived experience in the urban space instead of treating places as fixed coordinates. The campaign
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facilitated a connection between players and non-players, and the integration of everyday life with brand experience.
Under the surveillance of the cameras from the TV program crew, the whole game turned into a reality show. Players’ performance in the urban space, their interaction among themselves and the non-participants, the co-creation of mobile films, and consumer testimonies about the product turned into a marketing narrative. As they engaged themselves in the brand experience, they co-created value for the brand.
Overall, the convergence of mobile media, location technologies, and the game experience in hybrid space facilitated a fresh brand experience and raised brand and product awareness. By facilitating “collaborative spatiality” (Dan, et al., 2009) and extending it to real urban space, the campaign delivered a rich and dynamic brand experience, conveyed the campaign message to the target audience, and enabled product experience. While the campaign facilitated the entertaining experience of urban exploration, it also turned participants into content and value co-creators.
This Chapter, together with the previous four chapters, each presented a case falling into a separate quadrant in the matrix presented in Figure 2. These cases demonstrated different mobile-mediated co-creation brand experiences along three dimensions: content generation, centrality of mobile media, and interactive environment, delivering individual or collective experience. It was also explicated in these case studies how mobile media was adopted by the brand owners to achieve their strategic goals. Cross-case discussions are provided in Chapter 10 (Section 10.1.2).
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Chapter 10 Discussion and Conclusions
This final chapter provides an overview of the thesis, and presents a detailed discussion of the findings emerging from Study One (Chapter 4) and Study Two (Chapter 5 to Chapter 9) and how they relate to the initial objective. The chapter is structured as follows. Firstly, the main objectives of the thesis and its main findings are summarized. Secondly, the theoretical and empirical implications of the research are discussed. Thirdly, the limitations of this research and opportunities for future research are presented.
10.1 Main objective and findings of the thesis
10.1.1 Main objectives
While mobile marketing has been regarded as a significant opportunity with enormous potential, it has yet to see mass adoption by brand owners across industries in China. The main objective of this thesis was to investigate the factors influencing consumer brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing in China; and to ascertain how and to what effect brand owners use mobile media in marketing campaigns to facilitate a co-creative brand experience that caters to Chinese consumers’ dual desire for individuality and social interaction to build consumer relationships. The first question was addressed in Study One by semi-structured interviews with key industry informants. Study Two addressed the second question by using case studies of mobile marketing campaigns conducted in China to facilitate co-creation brand experiences.
Despite the expanding literature on mobile marketing, initial efforts in academia were devoted to studying adoption at the individual level, such as consumer attitudes toward mobile marketing (Dickinger & Kleijnen, 2008; S. Okazaki, 2008; Xu, 2006), and permission-based SMS advertising (Okazaki, et al., 2007). This research contributes to mobile marketing research at the firm level and examines various forms of mobile marketing in building consumer relationships through brand experience co-creation. By integrating Rogers’ theory of diffusion of innovation (2003) and Tornatzky and Fleischer’s TOE framework (1990) to investigate firms’ adoption of mobile marketing in China, this research has responded to the call for more theoretical application in new media research (Wei, 2009). It also opens up a line of new inquiry in examining the role of mobile marketing in facilitating co-created brand
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experiences and addressing the duality of individualism and collectivism in Chinese consumers.
Empirically, this research provides practitioners with an understanding of the drivers and barriers for brand owners in adopting mobile marketing; those on the supply side can use this knowledge to improve their offerings and propositions, and work together to drive the development of the mobile marketing industry. Further, this research assists brand owners and agencies in designing their mobile marketing strategies for building consumer relationships in China.
10.1.2 Discussion of main findings
Mobile marketing adoption factors. As an innovation, mobile marketing is adopted and adapted in technological, organizational and environmental contexts. Drawing on the TOE framework, combined with technological factors drawn from innovation diffusion theory, and based on Study One, Chapter 4 presented a revised framework of factors that influence adoption of mobile marketing by firms (Table 8) and a model of firms’ mobile marketing adoption in China (Figure 3). It unpacked the complexities in each context and demonstrated the relative importance of the environmental context, which impacts on the technological and organizational contexts. The research also showed the dynamics between individual adoption and organizational adoption, the network externalities as well as the change in the significance of some factors in the trajectory of mobile marketing adoption.
Further, the identification of those factors influencing the adoption of mobile marketing in case studies in Study Two increases the validity of the findings in Study One. This is discussed below.
Technological context. The campaigns all leveraged the relative advantages of the mobile media. The targeting capability of mobile media allowed Nokia and Shanda to target their potential consumers based on their lifestyle, in the Nokia E63 Campaign; it allowed Nokia to connect and interact with the young and fashionable target consumers in Nokia Supernova Campaign. Likewise, mobile media enabled Clean & Clear to target young females in the Clear Fairness Campaigns, and young urban consumers in the TNF Red Flag Campaign and the Nokia Fusion Challenge Campaign.
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All campaigns required user registrations via the mobile phone so that brand owners had access to data about real users for continuous communication. Registrations were completed via email on PC or the mobile, on campaigns sites or via mobile messages.
As a call-to-action device, the mobile phone generated actions by readers for interactive brand experiences: including customizing corporate-generated content in the Nokia E63 Campaign, seeking out for more content in transmedia storytelling in the Nokia Supernova Campaign, contributing to content generation in the Clean & Clear Clear Fairness Campaign, the TNF Red Flag Campaign and the Nokia Fusion Challenge Campaign. The portability and location-awareness of the mobile media is especially evident in the last two campaigns. In some cases, such as the TNF Red Flag Campaigns and the Nokia Fusion Challenge Campaign, mobile media drove participants to offline events. While TNF focused more on driving sales as participants were driven to events at points of purchase, both generated awareness of the products and built consumer relationships through the interactive experience. Further, the call-to-action capability and the portability of the mobile media together are particularly useful in the hybrid environment, where participants can respond to brand owners’ calls to action immediately, even when they are on the move outdoors.
Cost-efficiency proved to be a driver of brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing. For example, in Nokia Supernova Campaign, the cost of the mobile media in terms of CPC, CPA, and CPM were lower than other media, such as TV, and the CPC and CPA demonstrated particular advantage of mobile media to generate actions.
Further, the novelty effect was a relative advantage in the mobile marketing campaigns. All the brand owners were driven to adopt mobile marketing by the opportunity to deliver an innovative brand experience.
Given the complexity of the mobile marketing, most brand owners adopted simple technologies to allow users to participate. One exception was the Nokia Fusion Challenge Campaign, where the brand owner turned the complexity into an opportunity for targeting different user segments. Overall, simple and easy technologies encouraged participation in the initial stage, while more sophisticated, or less widely adopted, technologies were introduced later to cater to users with a more advanced technological literacy, and introduced them to a more sophisticated mobile lifestyle. This strategy was
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designed to achieve two-fold goals at different stages of the campaign: educating mass target consumers about the product, while also enabling core users to experience product features, and enhancing the product image of an “all-in-one” device. This, however, required the brand owner to make considerable efforts in their campaign planning and execution.
As the campaigns encouraged people to take action with their mobile phones, including registering for the campaign, activating the service, generating, sharing and downloading content, brand owners could clearly see the effectiveness of mobile media. The performance indicators of CPC and CPA presented the observability of the effectiveness of the mobile media, and the cross-media comparison gave brand owners a clearer picture of the market. Further, the observability was also enhanced by integrating the mobile with other media, including driving participants of the mobile mediated race to outdoor events or retail stores.
Two perceived barriers to adopting mobile marketing reported by the interviewees in Study One were the low network speed and the small screen. This is particularly relevant for mobile reading and the video viewing experience. In the Nokia E63 Campaign and the Clean & Clear Clear Fairness Campaign, the existing mobile reading market in China and consumer readiness lifted the technological barrier for the brand owner. Further, the supplementary role of the mobile media in the campaigns meant participants could also access content via PC. In the Nokia Supernova Campaign, the adoption of an appropriate format created small-size mobile videos, which obviated the problem of low network speed. In addition, people could access the online videos via PC or mobile, depending on their context. The delivery over PC screens complemented the small screen of the mobile.
The compatibility with other media had a positive impact on the adoption of mobile media in marketing. Compatibility of the mobile media with the traditional Internet, and, hence, the opportunity to integrate the mobile into the digital campaign, allowed brand owners to develop a continuous experience for users and reach a wider audience. Both technological and content convergence drove content delivery on mobile and traditional Internet. This is especially evident when the mobile assumed a supplementary role in the campaigns, such as in the Nokia E63 Campaign, the Nokia Supernova Campaign, and the Clean & Clear Clear Fairness Campaign. The integration with online and mobile community culture helped brand owners to augment their 208
campaign message, deliver a viral effect, and leverage grass-root creativity in content generation, best demonstrated in the Clean & Clear Clear Fairness Campaign.
When the mobile assumed a central role in hybrid space, the convergence between mobile and outdoor screens delivered a continuous brand experience and enhanced interactivity. The ubiquity, multi-functionality and interactive nature inherent in mobile media fitted well in the whole campaign and enhanced the brand experience. This was evidenced in the Nokia Supernova Campaign, the TNF Red Flag Campaign, and the Nokia Fusion Challenge Campaign.
The compatibility of mobile marketing with the existing marketing mindset and practice such as user segmentation and the focus on interactive experience – rather than broadcasting – drove brand owners to adopt mobile marketing.
While the mobile played an important role in the campaigns, the adoption decision was not technologically determined. This is particularly evident in the TNF Red Flag Campaign. Marketers did not opt for the latest trend in location-based mobile social networking service. Instead, they started by encouraging people to join in the game through SMS, owing to its wide adoption, simplicity and anonymity. Then participants could log onto the mobile Internet with the assigned username and password to keep up to date with the race. The lower entry barrier and the wider user base of SMS enabled marketers to engage with more people at the initial stage of the campaign.
Organizational Context. Innovation orientation was reported as being a driver of brand owner’s adoption of mobile marketing in Study One. This emerged again as a driver in Study Two. Nokia is as an example. It established itself as the global leader in the mobile market in the GSM era, and used to be a giant in the Finnish innovation system (Leinbach & Brunn, 2002). It adopted a portfolio approach to innovation which covered peer production, crowd-sourcing and lead-user co-creation, partnering with extended enterprises, and external companies in invention, development and marketing (Nokia Inc., 2008h). However, in recent years it has lost ground in the fast-growing and lucrative smart phone business owing to a lack of innovation (Kharif & Reinhardt, 2009). This drove the marketers to take an innovative approach to marketing. The Nokia E63 campaign was the brand’s experiment in mobile marketing, where it joined forces with mobile content and service provider, Shanda, and leveraged grass-root creativity. The Nokia Supernova Campaign leveraged the mobile’s personal nature to tap into
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people’s inner voyeur. The Fusion Challenge campaign leveraged the role of the mobile in the “reconstruction of space” (R. Ling & Campbell, 2009, p. 1). It not only enabled people to explore urban space, but also brought geographically dispersed people together and created an environment for “collaborative spatiality” (Dan, et al., 2009) in hybrid space, connecting online and offline experiences. The cooperation with the TV station for the production of the TV program turned the whole game into a reality show, and leveraged the players’ performance and user-generated content for the marketing narrative. This strategy extended the campaign message to a wider audience.
Other brand owners in Study Two were also innovation-oriented. Clean & Clear’s innovation orientation not only resulted in scientific innovation in skincare solutions, but also drove the firm to adopt innovative mobile marketing. The Clear Fairness Campaign capitalized on writers and genres emerging from the online literature community to connect with target consumers. As a firm which was committed to innovation, to striving for differentiation in a culture rewarding risk taking, TNF adopted the mobile and integrated it into the whole campaign to connect with Chinese consumers. The mobile phone was used to lower the participation barrier and to encourage people to go outdoors and enhance the brand image. The mobile was not only the destination where other media drove participants for the flag-planting race and collaborative mapping experience in hybrid space, but it also continued to drive participants to the stores and events for a real world experience.
Target market fit was also a strong driver for the brand owners to adopt mobile marketing, which supports the findings in Study One. Nokia as a mobile brand found its target consumer segment fit with mobile media users. The cooperation with the mobile content and service provider also helped to target online literature readers in the E63 Campaign. The mobile was the ideal media with which to reach and engage young, technologically-savvy, urban consumers in the Fusion Challenge campaign. As the teen skincare expert, Clean & Clear is committed to delivering skincare solutions to help young people to explore and experience all possibilities while growing up with confidence to face the world. As mobile media has become an important part of its target consumers’ life, it drove the brand owner to connect with its target consumers via mobile media. TNF adopted mobile marketing to connect with Chinese consumers, particularly the youth market, to build its position as a pioneering outdoor brand.
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Organizational readiness in terms of human resources and financial resources also facilitated brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing in the case campaigns of this thesis, as found in Study One. As a leading mobile brand, Nokia had a better understanding of mobile technologies and its potential use in marketing than brands in other industries. Agencies found it easier to communicate with marketers at Nokia. This was evidenced by their request to design a campaign that enabled people to use the mobile as much as possible in the campaign to deliver and enhance the campaign message. They also had a separate budget line for mobile marketing. In Clean & Clear’s case, the marketing manager also had some knowledge about mobile media, and had explicitly proposed in the agency brief that adoption of mobile media would be preferred. For TNF, the commitment to investing in marketing and digital media enhanced its organizational readiness to adopt mobile marketing.
Top management support was found to be a less critical factor in Study One, as the adoption decisions are often dependent on marketing managers or directors and top management generally has less knowledge about mobile marketing. In case studies, different levels of top management support were found in the organizations, which drove adoption of mobile marketing. As Nokia was reinventing itself as a mobile service provider, top management encouraged the efforts of directing users’ attention to both its device and service through mobile marketing. In the Supernova campaign, it was the brand’s strategic goal to treat the marketing campaign as more than a product launch. More importantly, the campaign needed to reflect a mobile lifestyle and the individual identity associated with the mobile. Embedding the mobile service in marketing campaigns was also a strategy to refresh their brand image. This was evidenced by the introduction of an array of mobile technologies and applications in the Fusion Challenge Campaign and the mobile email service in the E63 Campaign.
In Clean & Clear’s case, the adoption was driven more by the marketing managers’ intention to deliver innovative brand experiences. For TNF, it assumed strategic importance for VF Corporation as one of the strongest brands to drive growth and gains in the market share, especially in China, a high-growth, high-profit international market. Top management support was evidenced by the VF Corporation’s heavy investment in marketing and focus on delivering an innovative brand experience with digital media, which drove mobile marketing adoption.
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Firm size was found in Study One to positively influence mobile marketing adoption, as bigger firms have a more advanced marketing mindset and practice, and better resources. All firms in Study Two were big firms with an advanced marketing mindset and practice to build consumer relationships. They also had financial resources to support their innovation adoption.
Environmental context. Factors in the environmental context were found to play a key role in the adoption decision in Study One. Not surprisingly, competitive pressure was found to be an environmental stimulator, which was supported by findings in Study Two. While still the leader in the device market in China, Nokia faced increasing competition from disruptive forces, such as Apple, in the upmarket consumer segment as well as domestic brand, and the Shanzhai device at the lower end. Meanwhile, the functional appeal of mobile phones has become more or less the same. This put brand owners under pressure to connect with their target consumer through an innovative brand experience, which drove its mobile marketing adoption. The Supernova Campaign, for example, strengthened Nokia’s style credentials and its relevance to young people in face of increasing competition in the youth market. As its competitors were at a primitive stage in mobile marketing adoption, Nokia’s adoption of mobile marketing differentiated it from its competitors. For Clean & Clear, the lower consumer awareness of the whitening product range and the weak performance of the CF line drove marketers to look for new ways to reach and interact with their target consumers, and to raise product awareness and establish the credibility of the brand’s relevance to young skin needs through a fresh brand experience. In TNF’s case, the fierce competition from both international and local brands in the niche market drove its adoption of mobile marketing to enhance brand image.
Consumer readiness in terms of penetration of mobile phone and mobile Internet emerged as a key driver of firms’ mobile marketing adoption in Study One. Study Two also demonstrated the importance of consumer readiness in influencing firms’ adoption. User adoption of mobile media, particularly mobile literature and user sophistication paved a way for Nokia and Clean & Clear to use mobile novels to facilitate brand experiences. Nokia also adopted mobile marketing in the Supernova Campaign to fit into youth culture and media usage, to strengthen its association with the youth market in response to aggressive moves by competitors in this market segment.
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In TNF’s case, the latest location-based mobile social networking service was only emerging with a small user base; lack of consumer readiness became a barrier for the brand owners’ adoption. While these platforms may deliver a closer connection among participants and more viral effects, the small scale of the services and the lack of consumer readiness resulted in a lack of network externalities for brand owners’ adoption. However, the brand still managed to use the simpler technology of SMS to deliver a fresh brand experience in hybrid space. More importantly, SMS was able to drive more people to participate in the campaign. This shows mobile marketing with its various forms can serve different purposes. While some are simpler and better for activation, others are more suitable when addressing a niche of early adopters. Marketers need to seek the best match between technology, campaign objective, and consumer readiness.
In the Fusion Challenge Campaign Nokia targeted young, tech-savvy, urban consumers, with the core target being those sophisticated mobile media users. An array of mobile technologies was gradually introduced to target these different user groups, as they witnessed different levels of consumer readiness.
The lack of user sophistication was perceived as a hurdle for brand owners in mobile marketing adoption. However, brand owners can work around this by targeting different types of users with different mobile technologies. For example, the gradual introduction of mobile technologies and applications in the Fusion Challenge Campaign served to target consumers with different levels of user sophistication.
Consumer willingness to respond to mobile marketing campaigns providing easy opt-in options and good value is found to be a driver of firms’ adoption of mobile marketing, although there are concerns over spamming. In the Nokia E63 campaign, users’ positive attitude towards personalized mobile content drove the brand to adopt mobile marketing. Further, Ovi mail registration served as a mechanism for asking for permission, while product placement in the personalized content facilitated a non-interruptive entertainment experience. Users’ willingness to participate was also evidenced in campaigns, building on user-generated content, such as the Clean & Clear Clear Fairness Campaign, the TNF Red Flag Campaign and the Nokia Fusion Challenge Campaign. The privacy concern, as a conflict between the industry and its consumers (Wilken & Sinclair, 2009a), made the option of using mobile location-based social networking platforms less attractive in the TNF Red Flag Campaign. However, it did 213
not deter the brand owner’s adoption of SMS-based mobile marketing.
Regarding market supply, Study One found that the increasing growth of mobile content and services drives firms’ mobile marketing adoption while small-scale and homogeneity were barriers to adoption. This was also revealed in Study Two, with brand owners adopting various kinds of mobile content or services, including mobile reading, micro-blogging, mobile video, mobile photo sharing and location-based services, to interact with their target consumers. The lack of scale and fragmented scene in mobile location-based social networks was a barrier for TNF to integrate its marketing campaign into the existing mobile location-based communities.
Insufficient supply and fragmented expertise of mobile marketing agencies was found to be a barrier to firms’ adoption decision. In Study Two, brand owners either worked with the leading mobile marketing agencies, which had established cooperation with the traditional agencies, or worked with mobile content and service providers to get around the barrier. For example, the mobile specialist agency MMX China had its mobile media network, which made media purchase easier, and the capability of both campaign concept design and its execution provided a one-stop service for the brand and the its traditional agency. This facilitated the brand’s adoption of mobile marketing. This was especially evident in the Nokia Fusion Challenge Campaign, when it provided services, including media purchase, mobile site development, and mobile application development.
The availability of third-party monitoring was found to be a driver of the adoption of mobile marketing in Study One. The Nokia Fusion Challenge Campaign in Study Two used the third-party data monitoring provided by WAP-based Nielson Netratings, which enhanced the transparency and credibility of mobile media performance for marketers. Other campaigns were conducted before or around the same time as the launch of the service in August 2009, therefore they did not use the service. That, however, did not inhibit brand owners’ adoption of mobile marketing, as they could assess the results through benchmarking.
Flexible cooperation between industry players was found to drive firms’ adoption of mobile marketing in Study One, and Study Two supported this finding. As the leading device manufacturer moving ahead in mobile service provision, Nokia cooperated with the content and service provider Shanda Literature in the E63
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Campaign, which helped to build product awareness, promote the mobile literature culture, as well as the two parties’ service and platforms. The 3GP format of mobile video jointly developed by Nokia and Apple was important in the Nokia Supernova Campaign to deliver a desirable consumer experience owing to its compressed nature. The mobile specialist agency MMX China had its mobile media network, which made media purchase easier, and the capability of both campaign concept design, as well as execution provided a one-stop service for the brand and the its traditional agency. This facilitated the brand’s adoption of mobile marketing. The flexible cooperation between the brand owner’s agency with mobile media content and service providers also drove Clean & Clear’s adoption of mobile marketing in the Clear Fairness Campaign. The mobile portal 3g.cn not only proposed its mobile media ad inventory to promote awareness of the campaign, but also suggested using its resources in the mobile community to support the creative idea, augment the campaign message and achieve a viral effect. In this sense, 3g.cn also acted as a mobile marketing solution provider, assisting the brand owner’s agency to develop the campaign. The cooperation between the mobile marketing solution provider and the traditional agency was especially important in delivering well-integrated campaigns such as the TNF Red Flag Campaign and the Nokia Fusion Challenge Campaign.
In Study One, conflicts of interest among industry players were found to have a negative impact on firms’ adoption of mobile marketing. This was overridden by the flexible cooperation demonstrated in the case campaigns in Study Two.
Market education was found to have a positive impact on firms’ adoption decision in Study One. Mobile marketing agencies and solution providers play a significant role in educating brand owners and traditional agencies about mobile marketing. Study Two supports the finding. For example, in Clean & Clear Clear Fairness Campaign, as the mobile service provider 3g.cn was involved in mobile marketing solution development with the agency, it became a market education for the latter, as 3g.cn shared knowledge in the micro-blogging field, and how its service could be integrated with its mobile community services to serve the campaign. This assisted the brand owner and the agency to know more about mobile marketing opportunities, and to adopt the mobile media in the campaign.
Regarding the regulatory environment, investment in network infrastructure and network convergence, and promotion of a healthy industry environment were found in 215
Study One as a driver in firms’ adoption of mobile marketing. Study Two also shows the positive impact of these factors. Fast network speed was important in delivering a desirable mobile video viewing experience in the Nokia Supernova Campaign. By the end of 2009, the government and the operators had already started to purge the mobile media industry, which promoted the value of the mobile media. While an issue such as spamming was, and still is, hard to eradicate, the elevated value of mobile media drove the brand owner to adopt mobile marketing.
Study One found that the lack of legislation, regulatory loopholes, the lack of a dedicated and independent regulatory body, as well as fragmented and confusing operator policies led to regulatory and operational inefficiencies and had a negative influence on the adoption decision. This did not emerge out of the case studies as brand owners had all adopted mobile marketing.
Overall, the findings in Study Two increases the validity of the findings in Study One regarding the technological, organizational environmental factors driving the adoption of mobile marketing. The case studies also demonstrate that brand owners could work around some barriers and adopt mobile marketing to deliver innovative brand experiences.
The role of mobile in co-created brand experience. This thesis examines the role of mobile media in marketing campaigns along three dimensions: content generation and consumption, centrality of mobile media, and environment. The model of mobile-mediated co-creation brand experiences was proposed along these dimensions in Chapter 2 (See Figure 1). Along the axis of content generation, corporate generated content stands at one end and user generated content stands at the other end. Along the axis of environment, mobile media can facilitate brand experience in virtual space, or hybrid space (de Souza e Silva, 2006). Along the axis of centrality, mobile media assumes a supplementary or central role in marketing campaigns. The arguments made by Lash and Lury (2007) that media have come to act less as texts and more as things, as platforms or environments (Lash & Lury, 2007) is adopted here to examine the supplementary or central role of the mobile media. Based on this model, Chapter 5 to Chapter 9 examined five cases fitting into four quadrants in the matrix of mobile-mediated co-creation brand experiences (See Figure 2). A summary of the case campaigns are presented in Table 9.
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TABLE 9 A Summary of the Case Campaigns Case Strategic Target Innovation Tactics Outcomes goals audience Content Environment Centrality of Mobile Nokia E63 promote young cooperated with mobile literature virtual supplementary tool enhanced product awareness Campaign product and professionals mobile service user customization space for content enhanced brand image in mobile service provider of CGC customization Internet service promote mobile leveraged writers narrative device in enhanced consumers awareness of literature culture and genres the novel service providers’ platforms and services emerging from promoted the culture of mobile mobile literature literature community generated opportunity for online writers to work with commercial interests beyond the publishing industry Nokia enhance youth 18-30, mostly adopted online series mainly central narrative enabled a continuous Supernova preference of the women, transmedia CGC virtual device in the videos and interactive brand experience Campaign brand style-conscious, storytelling Mobile advertising space; and the multi-media promoted product recall deliver living in big leveraged the storytelling and preference entertaining and and medium mobile’s personal hybrid supplementary tool built identification interactive brand sized cities nature to tap into space for content delivery with the mobile lifestyle experience people’s inner when in (advertising; mobile promote product voyeur integrati videos; mobile site; recall and on with mobile MMS alert) preference to outdoor supplementary tool generate sales screen for eavesdropping media central interface in hybrid space in outdoor experience 217
TABLE 9 (Cont’d) A Summary of the Case Campaigns Case Strategic goals Target Innovation Tactics Outcomes audience Content Environment Centrality of Mobile Clean & build consumer 13-24 (core leveraged writers UGC virtual supplementary tool and enhanced brand and product Clear awareness target and genres Microblog space platform for content awareness Clear establish aged16-24, emerging from relay novel co-creation enhanced purchase intention Fairness relevance to female) online literature augmented the delivered fresh brand experience Campaign young target community campaign message and drove user participation consumers delivered a viral effect delivered better cost effectiveness through integration with in generating actions online and mobile smaller participation on mobile community culture than PC small download of user co-created content TNF build the brand urban leveraged the UGC hybrid central tool for location enhanced brand image Red image of “Start consumers mobile to lower location spaces sharing and interface of overachieved the target of Flag Exploring” ( key target: participation sharing hybrid space participation Campaign encourage aged 18- 24) barrier central tool and extended the brand spirit beyond outdoor integrated the platform for a social the hard-to-reach corners of the participation to mobile well into network of competitors world to hybrid spaces grow the market the whole central tool and campaign platform in collaborative mapping
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TABLE 9 (Cont’d) A Summary of the Case Campaigns
Case Strategic goals Target Innovation Tactics Outcomes audience Content Environment Centrality of Mobile Nokia enhance function- facilitated UGC hybrid supplementary tool for enhanced product awareness Fusion product image oriented dynamics of Location spaces game registration enabled product experience Challenge deliver product urban communities sharing central tool and reached a wider audience experience consumers facilitated geospatial platform in field game through reality TV and online videos aged 20 to interaction annotation experience 35, mainly between collaborative male participants and production of non-participants mobile films Field game doubled up as reality TV show
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All the case campaigns targeted the youth market. Entertainment, games, and the media are important elements of youth culture; they are becoming part of young people’s wireless surroundings (Manuel Castells, et al., 2006, p. 146). Therefore mobile media is ideal for reaching and engaging the target young consumers. Strategic goals included promoting product awareness, enhancing youth preference, delivering entertaining and interactive brand experience, promoting product recall and preference to generate sales, establishing relevance to young target consumers, promoting the outdoor lifestyle to grow the category, enhancing brand image, expanding customer base, enhancing product image, and delivering product experience. Tactics of using mobile media to achieve the strategic goals were analysed based on the three dimensions in the model (See Figure 1): content generation and consumption, centrality of the mobile media, and environment.
As the mobile phone is understood as a cultural experience (Aguado & Martínez, 2007), for brand owners, finding the spot that connects mobile culture with the brand ethos and communication goals can go a long way in leveraging the mobile for marketing purposes. In the case campaigns analysed previously, the brands captured the emerging mobile culture around mobile novels, microblogging, MMS magazines, mobile snapshot, and mobile mediated field games to provide an environment where people could engage themselves in co-creation activities in both culture and commerce.
For a mobile phone brand, it is easier to connect mobile culture with its marketing efforts. This is especially evident in the Nokia campaigns. To garner more users for its mobile device and mobile Internet service, and to build public awareness of its strategic transition to a service provider, Nokia championed the mobile lifestyle and played the role of market educator. Mobile marketing not only serves to promote product and service, but also to promote the mobile lifestyle. For brands in other industries, the role of the mobile in changing sociality has also affected marketing practice. For example, the TNF Red Flag Campaign demonstrated the benefits of finding the connection between mobile culture and brand ethos. As the marketers found the connection between the culture around mobile check-in culture, social mapping, virtual items, and 220
its objective of getting Chinese people to start exploring, they capitalized on the emerging mobile spatiality and combined it with the symbolic meanings of virtual items to build the brand image.
In terms of content generation, the line is blurring between commerce and culture, more specifically, mobile culture and mobile marketing. This supports the argument of Jenkins and Deuze (2008) that media can be seen as the key drivers and accelerators of a growing integration between culture and commerce. Firstly, the emerging forms of mobile culture find their way into marketing campaigns. As mobile literature, mobile video, micro-blogging, mobile check-in, mobile location-based games get popular, marketers take a consumer-oriented approach to fit into their culture to connect and interact with their target consumers.
Secondly, brand owners are also increasingly tapping into the creative talents emerging from mobile subculture communities. This is evidenced in the Nokia E63 Campaign and the Clean & Clear Clear Fairness Campaign. While Nokia retained control of the content by only allowing consumers to customize the pre-authored branching novel, Clean & Clear enabled participants to contribute content, interact with the lead author as well as among themselves. The strategy of leveraging creative talents emerging from mobile subculture in content generation helps to connect with the target consumers. Engaging Pro-Ams (Leadbeater & Miller, 2004) in corporate-generated content demonstrates the dynamics between culture and commerce, which leads to the hybrid nature of the content, where grass-root creative talents work for corporate interests. This also demonstrates how commercial and amateur players interact in more complex ways in a “hybrid media ecology” (Benkler, 2006).
Thirdly, the cooperation between brand owners and mobile content and service providers also demonstrates the convergence between commerce and culture. Nokia’s cooperation with Shanda Literature in the Nokia E63 Campaign to promote mobile product and service, and grow mobile literature market is such an example. While Shanda Literature builds its business on user-generated online literature, the two parties’
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common goal in promoting mobile literature in their separate strategies in device, content and service drives industry convergence. In the new media environment where “the boundaries between commerce, content and information are being redrawn” (van Dijck, 2009), various parties including consumers, Pro-Ams (Leadbeater & Miller, 2004), content and service providers play important roles in brand experience co-creation.
The content reflecting personality, identity and lifestyle was highly associated with the personal nature of the mobile phone, which made it an ideal content delivery tool. This was evidenced in the Nokia E63 Campaign, the Nokia Supernova Campaign and the Clean & Clear Clear Fairness Campaign. This helped to establish an intimate bond between consumers and the protagonist in the story, as well as the brand. The mobile can assist brand owners to build more personalized relationships with their target customers.
For individual experience based on corporate-generated content, the mobile acts as a content delivery tool. It can play a supplementary role to other media such as the wired Internet, or act as a central tool, mostly in outdoor space owing to its portability. The particularities of the mobile allow participants to keep up-to-date with the content as they go, and facilitates a continuous experience via alerts to draw people back into the campaign. This is particularly relevant in the case of the serial novel in the Nokia E63 Campaign and serial videos in the Nokia Supernova Campaign. The capabilities intrinsic to the mobile, such as its ubiquity and multi-functionality, and its integration with outdoor media, allowed it to be a central interface in a hybrid world (de Souza e Silva, 2006), where the lines became blurred between the real and the narrative, the physical and the virtual.
In the cases of corporate-generated content, the narrative is tightly controlled and the opportunities for interaction are limited. Despite that, it appears that brand owners tend to inject a certain degree of interactivity to enrich the content consumption experience, and facilitate the individualistic brand experience of meaning and value negotiation. The Nokia E63 Campaign was a customized reading experience, which,
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according to Marie-Laure Ryan (2001), is a selective form of interactivity, as opposed to productive form of interactivity where the viewer also becomes the creator. In the Nokia Supernova Campaign, consumers were required to take the effort to seek out and piece together the distributed content for a whole understanding of the transmedia storytelling (Jenkins, 2006a). Thus the marketers eschewed the passivity of one-way broadcast in favour of a more participatory form of storytelling. This is an effective strategy in that it involves consumers more closely with the brand and builds a stronger relationship.
Corporate-generated content comes with the opportunity of product placement to promote brand and product awareness. Developed for Hollywood cinema, product placement has found its way into television and other media and entertainment forms (Hackley, 2005, p. 144). It offers “brand organizations a way of circumventing consumer resistance or cynicism towards conventional advertising” (Hackley, 2005, p. 144). With the development of mobile media, product placement has also been adopted by brand owners in corporate-generated content.
Product placement has given brand owners in the mobile industry a bonus opportunity to simultaneously promote the mobile lifestyle and culture. This was obvious, for example, in the Nokia Supernova Campaign, where the mobile assumed the central role in corporate-generated content, inheriting the cinematic legacy of the telephone as a narrative device (Ruston, 2008). In addition, the private content stored in mobile phones provided important clues and different perspectives, and enriched the story for the viewers. The characters’ mobile lifestyle also spoke to target consumers. The centrality of the mobile was evident in its role as a narrative device and in its integration with the outdoor screen. It delivered an interactive experience in a hybrid space for participants. By using the mobile as the interface of a hybrid space, brand owners can extend consumer relationships beyond the virtual space.
For mobile industries, mobile marketing also offers opportunities for enabling people to experience the promoted product or service. Nokia adopted such an approach
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in some of its marketing campaigns. For example, the Nokia E63 Campaign promoted the mobile product and service as well as the mobile literature culture by delivering content via mobile email, and leveraging the mobile as a tool of expressing life attitudes. This tactic is also found in the cases of user-generated content, such as the Nokia Fusion Challenge Campaign. Participants used the N78 as the central tool in field games to coordinate with team members in task completion and content creation. By allowing people to experience the product or service in co-creating content and value, the brand grasped the opportunity to drive purchase intention.
For collective experience based on user-generated content, the mobile acts as both a tool and a platform for content generation and consumption. The co-creation experience goes beyond the tick-box level involving simplistic templates (Gauntlett, 2011). The mobile allowed the participants to capture their spontaneous creativity, and facilitated the interaction with the lead author, and among themselves. While facilitating the interactive and co-creative experience as a platform, the mobile also enhances the experience when integrated with the existing mobile communities and subculture. This is evident in the Clean & Clear Clear Fairness Campaign, where the mobile community’s sharing, voting and commenting mechanisms, and its other community features, such as avatars and value added service, were integrated in the campaign to augment the campaign message and encourage participation. In Henry Jenkin’s words, the campaign “both pull[ed] people together and [gave] them something to do” (Jenkins, 2006b). The dynamics between the participants and the brand, or Pro-Ams (Leadbeater & Miller, 2004), created more opportunities for value co-creation as the mobile facilitated creativity as the social glue (Gauntlett, 2011).
Product placement was also found in the Clean & Clear Clear Fairness Campaign. While Nokia planned to promote the embedded mobile device and service in the content, the skincare related problems initiated by participants were leveraged by the brand owner and the lead author to fish for more discussion around the topic, and engaged in product placement. In this process of co-creating content and negotiating meaning, other dynamics emerged between the contributing authors, the lead writer, and 224
the marketers. This supports the observation of OgilvyOne (2010), that Chinese social media users actually want to be friends of brands, “frands”, and they see brands and the discussion of them as an integral part of their social network. This is different to consumer attitudes and behaviour in the mature Western markets. By leveraging the mobile media in content co-creation, the brand owner not only enhanced interaction with the participants, but also built awareness of the brand as a youth skincare expert, and the campaign products’ relevance to target consumers. As consumer brand capitalism is still new enough to the Chinese market, which has experienced a quantum leap in its development in mobile technologies, leveraging the mobile in content co-creation can facilitate interactions between the participants and the brand, and more importantly, among the participants themselves.
In the case of user co-creation of content, participants were more interested in the process of co-creation than they were in the end product. This is shown by the small number of novel downloads in the Clean & Clear Clear Fairness Campaign. It supports Gauntlett’s argument that creativity needs to be understood as a process, not as a final product (2011, pp. 220-221). Owing to its portability, the mobile facilitates everyday creativity, and embeds brand co-creation experiences into everyday life.
When encouraging consumer creative participation via the mobile, the particularities of the mobile as a tool are an important consideration. A simple and easy way of contributing content and interacting with brands and other consumers also needs to be in place to encourage user input and interaction. As a supplementary tool or platform, the mobile may attract smaller participation compared to other tools or platforms, such as the fixed Internet. For example, the Clean & Clear Clear Fairness Campaign witnessed a big gap in registrations between the leading website and the leading WAP site.
In contrast to the Clean & Clear Clear Fairness Campaign, the mobile acted as the central tool and platform in content co-creation in The North Face Red Flag campaign, and the Nokia Fusion Challenge Campaign to facilitate the brand experience in hybrid
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space. While the centrality of the mobile is most evident when acting as the interface of the hybrid space (de Souza e Silva, 2006), the location-awareness further enriches the interactive brand experience. While some studies suggest that mobile phones withdraw users from physical space (Gergen, 2002; Puro, 2002), others argue against this view. The mobile media foregrounds the place and locality in the community. It is argued that network relationships are reshaped and mobilized through reconfigurations of co-presence, proximity and distance in relation to the use of the mobile media (Mascheroni, 2007). Mobile technologies, under the label of locative media and bottom-up process reinforce the hybridization of physical space and cyberspace, bringing new senses of place and community (Lemos, 2010).
Compared to other marketing communication approaches, mobile marketing communications combines high levels of location specificity and interactivity (Sultan & Rohm, 2005). As the monitoring capacity of wireless interactivity promises to track the mobility, the spatial dimension becomes one more way to differentiate marketing appeals, which can be adapted flexibly to the spatio-temporal trajectory (Andrejevic, 2003). However, both the TNF Campaign and the Nokia Fusion Challenge Campaign leveraged the location-awareness of the mobile media in a significantly different way from the approach of monitoring in proximity marketing (e.g. Barnes, 2003; Hosbond & Skov, 2007; Kurkovsky & Harihar, 2006).
Both the TNF Red Flag Campaign and the Nokia Fusion Challenge Campaign leveraged the location awareness of the mobile media to encourage participants’ mobility in the urban space to convey their campaign messages. TNF encouraged people to check in at physical places via the mobile to join in the race to claim a virtual piece of land and, meanwhile, engage in a collaborative mapping effort. The self-reported locations represented by virtual flags generated the thematic map of the brand ethos. Nokia used photo sharing for game registration and then engaged participants in the field game of mobile-mediated task completion in urban space, before bringing geographically dispersed participants to one city for the collaborative exploration and storytelling of the urban space. By tying the experience directly to place and urban space, 226
the campaigns delivered the brand experience of “lived space” (Debord, 1977).
While the mobile acted as the tool and platform to capture and display the fabrics of urban space, it was the participants’ movements through space that created the narrative, and their interactions with each other that negotiated the meaning of the place, and constructed the space. de Certeau argued that the street is a place defined by urban planning but is transformed into a space through the act of walking. He suggested that “space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. […] In short, space is a practiced place” (de Certeau, 1984, p. 117). The act of walking in the city is distinguished from the act of looking down from a skyscraper, and turns the voyeur into a participant (de Certeau, 1984). Experience of the city shifts from, in de Certeau’s terms, an act of consumption to an act of production.
By leveraging the location-awareness of the mobile media, the TNF Red Flag Campaign and the Nokia Fusion Challenge Campaign both encouraged the mobility of participants in the co-creation brand experience. Their movement in the real urban space, and their interaction with each other and other city dwellers via mobile media formed a central part of their brand experience. This reflected the shift in focus of mobility from device to person: their physical capabilities and technological means by which they communicate with others, which is “critical for a future where we imagine and design services for people that augment their daily lives rather than forcing them to adopt and adapt to ever-changing technologies” (Lane, Thelwall, Angus, Peckett, & West, 2006, p. 23). The interaction around shared values and codes of meaning among participants leads to collective identity (Manuel Castells, et al., 2006, p. 144).
By encouraging participants to explore the urban space and embed the mobile media in their exploration, both the TNF Red flag campaign and the Nokia Fusion Challenge Campaign were characterized by the new approach to mobile locative media suggested by Kabisch (2010). In his words, it is “a move away from more constrained views of static data toward dynamic representation and emergent behaviour; from
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representational and documentary to living and enacted; from online and distant perspectives to local and immersed; from augmented reality to alternate reality; and from participation to engagement” (Kabisch, 2010, p. 50). Participants took “situated action” (Suchman, 1987) and experienced “serendipitous encounters” (Lane, et al., 2006, p. 12) rather than following a planned itinerary as they had to reorient themselves with the dynamic map, the new instructions to search for new locations, evaluate alternative paths, choose modes of transportation, or micro-coordination with team mates (Rich Ling, 2004).
Recall that the North Face Campaign approached the places as fixed coordinates by encouraging participants to check in. The Cartesianism in the locative media that focused on the forms of self-representation afforded by GPS has been widely critiqued for reducing the complexity of human action into simple markers (Crandall, 2005; Galloway & Ward, 2005). By integrating the mobile check-in culture with the symbolism of the virtual item, the TNF campaign facilitated the establishment of a collective identity and collective memory among participants. In the Nokia Fusion Challenge campaign, the mobile media brought out the rich nature and dynamics of the urban space, and facilitated the interaction between players and non-players.
While the city itself is the collective memory of its people (Rossi, 1984), the mobile-mediated journey of exploration created a collective memory for participants in both the TNF Red Flag Campaign and the Nokia Fusion Challenge Campaign. As rapid urbanization and transformation of the urban space is ongoing in contemporary China, the brand experience created a collective memory of exploration and also updated people’s urban memory. By tying the mobile with the local experience, and facilitating user generated content, the collective experience of urban space consumption doubled up as production of collective memory and narrative of urban space.
More importantly, as participants walked in the city, they generated information and narrative, interacted with each other, and consumed relevant content from their local perspective. Encouraging participants in urban exploration was as much a means to
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generate content as an end in itself. As Kabisch (2010, p. 51) pointed out, “To emphasise objects and coordinates is to be concerned with nouns—with entities that are acted upon and known about. While this focus may elucidate the known, perhaps a focus on action—on verbs—might bring into view the act of knowing.” It was through walking in the city that participants chose to view content relevant to them, either geographically or culturally, thus to “actualize” the information through the interface of the locative medium (A. de Souza e Silva & Sutko, 2011, p. 35). Meanwhile they also generated content in meaning and value co-creation.
Both cases demonstrated the dynamics between participants and maps, and interactions among participants themselves, to varying degrees. While traditional maps represent reality, dynamic locative maps work in connection to reality (A. de Souza e Silva & Sutko, 2011, p. 31). As the mobile acted as the central tool and platform in hybrid space, participants experienced a “shared encounter”, “the interaction between two people or within a group where a sense of performative co-presence is experienced and which is characterised by a mutual recognition of spatial or social proximity” (Willis, Roussos, Chorianopoulos, & Struppek, 2010, p. 4). Brand owners can build connections with their target audience by leveraging the mobile media to facilitate shared encounters in hybrid space to build brand image and celebrate the brand ethos. As the participants engaged themselves in the co-creation experience, they were also performing the brand.
The TNF Red Flag Campaign was more straightforward; participants simply needed to check in at various places. The maps were constantly updated in response to the participants’ actions in a dynamic, participatory cartography. The updating of the map, in turn, influenced other participants’ actions in the race, as they could not check in at place that had already been claimed. Therefore participants may have cared more about other participants’ traces in their immediate surroundings, and filtered the user-generated geo-location information accordingly. The integration with the outdoor screen brought shared experiences into a public setting and augmented the campaign message, invited more participation and enhanced interactivity. The mobile also facilitated a continuous experience by driving participants to offline events and stores, 229
where they were exposed to store promotions and tasted the fun of outdoor sports and exploration in a simulated situation. In the Nokia Fusion Challenge Campaign, the geographically dispersed participants formed a virtual community based on geo-tagging around a particular theme, where they negotiated the meanings of places. Participants could explore the whole map of fashionable landmarks and interact with each other through photo-sharing community. These familiar strangers then had the opportunity to meet each other in real urban space and engage in content co-creation and collaborative spatiality.
In her critique of locative media, Fusco (2004) is concerned that abstract connectedness is substituted for any real engagement with people in other places, or even in their own locale. However, mobile media can be integrated into the whole marketing campaign to drive people to the real world and extend the online communities offline. It facilitated a continuous experience of connectedness in the hybrid environment. While the TNF Ref Flag Campaign witnessed the mobile driving participants to offline experiences, the interaction among participants was less a communal experience for participants than a sales-drive by marketers. The Nokia Fusion Challenge Campaign started with building connections among participants and facilitating a “portable community” (Chayko, 2007), which later extended their activities to “collaborative spatiality” (Dan, et al., 2009, p. 387) in the real world.
Environment. While the urban space was scripted into the participants’ co-creation and exploration experience in both the TNF Red Flag Campaign and the Nokia Fusion Challenge Campaign, they demonstrated different approaches and varying degrees of dynamics and interactivity. TNF approached the places more as fixed coordinates, simply encouraging participants to check in at various locations and aggregating the self-positioning data (Benford, et al., 2004) into the collaborative content.
Nokia adopted a different approach in the Fusion Challenge Campaign by teasing out the user generated content about the whole city as they engaged themselves in urban
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exploration, which went beyond marking or geotagging. By doing so, it not only allowed more creativity, but also captured more interaction between the participants and the rich nature and everyday dynamics in the urban space, including the buildings, landmarks, public screens, city dwellers, and everyday urban scenes and cultures. Lynch proposed in his seminal book The Image of the City (1960) that people understand urban space through the construction of mental maps, which are formed by their experiences of navigating urban space. He argues that “Moving elements in a city, and in particular the people and their activities, are as important as the stationary physical parts […] While [the city] may be stable in general outlines for some time, it is ever changing in detail” (Lynch, 1960, p. 2). By approaching the urban space as a whole and facilitating the interaction between participants and non-participants, Nokia delivered a richer experience of urban exploration, where people discovered its rich nature and dynamics, and enjoyed serendipitous encounters, “a feature of metropolitan life” which is “considered by many people to be of great value and benefit – one of the greatest pleasures of living in a big city” (Lane, et al., 2006, p. 12). This was also achieved by facilitating various perspectives of the urban space from participants, both local and foreign, in a mobile society in the phase of game registration. This is particularly relevant in a contemporary China witnessing rapid urbanization and transformation in its urban spaces as well as the development of the mobile lifestyle.
The mobile was well integrated into the whole campaign in both cases. In the TNF Red Flag Campaign, other media, such as outdoor screens, were employed to drive people to the mobile platform for the flag-planting race in hybrid space. The mobile continued to play an important role in driving participants to outdoor events, creating shared memories and igniting their passion for outdoor sports and natural world exploration. The dynamics between different media drove participation, facilitated a continuous brand experience, and augmented the campaign message. In Nokia Fusion Challenge Campaign, with the surveillance in the form of reality TV, the collective experiences and participant testimony turned into user generated content for its marketing narrative. This helped to convey the campaign message to a wider audience.
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Meanwhile, it also demonstrated that the border between content and advertising has become blurred (Andrejevic, 2003)
It has been argued that traditional media’s role becomes focused on driving consumers onto interactive platforms, where marketers can deliver optimized messages targeted at tightly defined audiences, provide virtual brand experiences, and build relationships with consumers (Higgs & Polonsky, 2007). These cases show that new media also drives people to the real world. Effective marketing strategies means the need to integrate the mobile into the whole marketing campaign, generating dynamics between different media, between online and offline experiences. The mobile as locative media and the interface of hybrid space (de Souza e Silva, 2006) is particularly relevant here.
Overall, the cases demonstrate how brand owners adapt the mobile for marketing purposes as text, tool, platforms, and environments (Lash & Lury, 2007) to facilitate user agency and elicit consumer creativity to deliver co-creation brand experience. Value co-creation has always existed, as there is no value in production without consumption. Digital media enable value co-creation in a distributed, networked environment where end-user productivity becomes more dynamic than mere consumption. Creative participation in content consumption and generation in virtual or hybrid space emerges as an important source of added value, particularly in mobile marketing, as this thesis demonstrates. While it has been argued that mobile phones are perfectly suited to the ideology of an individualistic society committed to networking (M. Castells, 2001), it is my contention that the mobile phone, originally invented as a personal communication device, can cater to the dualities of individualism and collectivism in contemporary Chinese society, and facilitate co-creation of brand experience along a spectrum of interactivity in terms of content generation, integration, and environment.
The mobile, in integration with other media, holds considerable promise for marketers to achieve different strategic objectives. It supports the previous finding that mobile marketing enables marketers to build brand awareness, increase consumer
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involvement and interaction, influence consumer response and activation (Sultan & Rohm, 2005), and build consumer relationships (Advani & Choudhury, 2001; Friedrich, et al., 2009). As the mobile phone is a cultural experience (Aguado & Martínez, 2007), finding the connection between mobile culture and the brand ethos and communication goals can go a long way in leveraging the mobile media for marketing purposes. Users assume an important role in terms of building mobile content and the service market, which triggers innovative marketing practices. Therefore it is important for marketers to recognize the significance and relevance of mobile phones to the target consumers, and to fit into their mobile culture.
With all its targeting and call-to-action capabilities, ubiquitous and personal nature, and location awareness, mobile marketing is more than about delivering relevant messages to target consumers. The potential of the mobile would be undervalued if it were treated as just another channel alongside TV, print, and online. The dynamics between mobile and other media enhance the effectiveness of the whole campaign. The mobile can turn traditional exposures, such as outdoor screens, into instantaneous consumer engagements. It can also drive people to action and interaction in the real world, as well as injecting more mobility into connections with brands and also among themselves.
The mobile media can be integrated into marketing campaigns to facilitate a spectrum of interactivity, where consumers assume different levels of user agency in co-creating brand experiences, from content customization to user-generated content, from virtual space to hybrid space, from individual to communal experience. In virtual space it can act as a supplementary content delivery tool, a content co-creation tool or a platform. It can also act as the central narrative device, which is particularly relevant for mobile brand owners to promote mobile products and lifestyle. As a tool and as a platform, and under the label of locative media, the mobile assumes the central role as the interface of hybrid space (de Souza e Silva, 2006) to facilitate co-creation of brand value and experience, and inject a dynamic into hybrid space.
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As the mobile reshapes Chinese urban life, and with communities becoming more mobile and increasingly relocated in hybrid space, the mobile is expected to become more important for marketers. Looking forward, the future of mobile marketing appears to be one of exciting growth and experimentation, yet it is fraught with risks and unknowns. While mobile advertising based on precision targeting is witnessing rapid growth worldwide, the role of mobile media in facilitating co-creation of brand value and experience is expected to come to marketers’ attention. Its potential to address the tensions between rising individualism and the deep-seated collectivism of Chinese consumers is an area for further research.
10.2 Theoretical and empirical implications
10.2.1 Theoretical Contributions This research has conceptualized mobile marketing as an innovation which is adopted and adapted in given technological, organizational and environmental contexts. The two studies undertaken in this thesis contribute to a better understanding of the adoption and use of mobile marketing by brand owners’ in China. The thesis contributes to innovation adoption research, the TOE framework and mobile marketing literature.
This research contributes to the literature on firms’ adoption of mobile marketing in several ways. Firstly, this study empirically verifies the applicability of the TOE framework in understanding innovation adoption, in this case, mobile marketing adoption by firms.
Secondly, the theoretical contribution also lies in the development of a new understanding of how firms are adopting mobile marketing. This is based on an assessment of the current state of mobile marketing, a review of the literature, and an empirical investigation (See Table 8 and Figure 3). The study delivers several key findings and insights on factors influencing mobile marketing adoption by firms. Specifically, this study found two significant drivers of mobile marketing adoption (i.e.,
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target market fit, market education). These were seldom explored in the prior mobile marketing adoption research. The research unpacks complicated factors such as consumer readiness, market supply, conflicts of interest among industry players, and regulatory environment. By examining the market supply, it has responded to Frambach and Schillewaert’s call (2002) for more research to examine the influence of supplier activities on innovation adoption at the organizational level. Further, this study has identified the dynamics of, and interdependencies between, different contextual factors, and between individual adoption and organizational adoption.
Thirdly, the findings from the interview data serve as a basis for further research on firms’ mobile marketing adoption. By verifying the applicability of the TOE framework, and identifying new insights into brand owners’ mobile marketing adoption, this research both confirms and advances the knowledge base.
This research also contributes to the expanding body of literature on mobile marketing by building a model of the role of mobile media in marketing campaigns along three dimensions: the role of mobile in content generation, media integration, and interactive environment. Specifically, it provides insights into the role of mobile media in facilitating co-creative experience based on user-generated content or corporate-generated content, where it assumes a supplementary or central role in virtual or hybrid space. This thesis is significant as it demonstrates the need to conceptualize consumers as more than simply targets of mobile marketing campaigns. It illustrates how consumers become co-creators in mobile-mediated brand experience. Value co-creation has always existed, as there is no value in production without consumption. Digital media enable value co-creation in a distributed, networked environment where end-user productivity becomes more dynamic than mere consumption. Creative participation in content consumption and generation in virtual or hybrid space emerges as an important source of added value, particularly in mobile marketing, as this thesis demonstrates.
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Finally, while evidence from the Asian contexts builds on the premise of the studies in a Western context that mobile phones are by nature an “individualistic” technology (Qiu, 2010), this research shows that the mobile can be leveraged to cater to both rising individualism and deep-rooted collectivism in Chinese society. The knowledge of the role of mobile media in facilitating co-creative experience is especially significant when spamming is rampant in the mobile marketing industry in China and short-term sales-driven efforts dominate brand owners’ practice (In-Stat, 2008).
10.2.2 Empirical implications The empirical implications are three-fold. First, the findings of this research provide a useful analysis for the mobile marketing industry players about the factors influencing brand owners’ adoption decision. The findings reveal views from different industry actors on brand owners’ mobile marketing adoption. It provides practitioners with a better understanding of mobile marketing ecosystem in China, including the roles of technological suppliers, traditional advertising agencies, mobile marketing agencies and solution providers, mobile content and service providers, operators, and regulatory parties. The findings could assist practitioners, including both suppliers and marketers, in driving the adoption of mobile marketing among brand owners.
Second, from the policy perspective, the findings suggest government bodies need to further improve the regulatory environment by continuing investment in network infrastructure and network convergence; cracking down on spamming practices; fixing legislative and regulatory loopholes; and setting up a dedicated and independent regulatory body. Operators need to be more transparent in their policies. Moreover, appropriate institutions, such as industry associations, need to create educational opportunities for marketers to harness the potential of the mobile media in building consumer relationships.
Third, this research also assists brand owners and agencies in understanding the potential of mobile media for facilitating co-creative brand experience to address the dualities of individualism and collectivism among Chinese consumers. It suggests that
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marketers can go beyond mobile advertising based on precision targeting to gain a competitive edge in facilitating co-creation in brand experience. This is especially significant in China, where mobile marketing is haunted by spam and is dominated by short-term sales-driven efforts (In-Stat, 2008).
10.3 Limitations of the research
This study has several limitations, which also offer opportunities for future research. First, since the research was based on data collected in China, caution needs to be exercised in generalizing into other countries. Second, Study One employed the method of semi-structured interviews based on a limited interview sample. As such, there may be other factors that also influence a firm’s adoption decision. The quality of key informants, including the range of industry players and the positions of the key informants in the firms, however, limits the impact of this limitation on the research findings. The interview approach, while delivering rich insights for exploring, identifying, and understanding viewpoints, attitudes, and influences (Healy & Perry, 2000), is limited in terms of its generalizability. The clear description of the research methods, however, allows replications of the research to determine the generalization of the findings. In future, a larger scale survey could be used to statistically confirm the findings regarding adoption factors at a more general level. Third, the data was gathered between September 2009 and March 2010, therefore it should be interpreted with care. As the mobile marketing landscape changes, adoption factors may change as well. Fourthly, the case studies are limited to the adopters of mobile marketing, which serve as a partial support for the findings of Study One. Future research can be conducted on non-adopters to test the findings. Lastly, more user studies in the co-creation campaigns would have been valuable.
10.4 Recommendations for future research
Looking into the future, there are several interesting research avenues. First, larger scale survey research could be used to statistically confirm the findings at a more general 237
level. Second, as technological advances and changes in environmental context advances will reshape the mobile marketing landscape, it becomes possible to conduct research using longitudinal data to examine how the change in the contextual factors influences firms’ adoption decision. Third, further research can explore other factors to enhance the understanding of firms’ adoption of mobile marketing, or assess the degree of influence of the various factors. Fourth, further studies on non-adopters would test the findings arising out of this study, and advance the literature. Fifth, future research can also be conducted on the influential factors on the routinization of mobile marketing adoption by firms. Sixth, international comparative research can be conducted to examine the similarities and differences in firms’ mobile marketing adoption. Such approach may generate insights into the importance of different influential factors and the dynamics between them in different regions. It will also be helpful in identifying the innovative adaptation of mobile media by brand owners in different areas. In addition, the international perspective can further the understanding of the mobile-mediated co-creation of value in brand experience.
Further, studies focusing on different organizational or industry settings would advance the understanding of both the adoption and use of mobile marketing to meet strategic objectives. This will be helpful in testing whether the insights into certain types of organizations or industries can be generalized to others success factors of mobile marketing adoption and mobile-mediated co-creation brand experience. And finally, as mobile devices become the primary mode for accessing the Internet, especially in China, more sophisticated mobile marketing opportunities will emerge, leveraging mobile applications, location-based services, and mobile social networking services. Further research could track the development of firms’ adoption and the use of these emerging mobile marketing opportunities.
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