Going forward

Citation

Unger, B. (2012), "Going forward", Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, Vol. 6 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/jrim.2012.32506caa.002

Going forward

Article Type: Lead commentary From: Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, Volume 6, Issue 3

Achievements and challenges in research on business usage of mobile and social media initiatives

The Call for Papers for this Special Issue noted a focus on advertising within both social media and mobile environments, but its papers are a mix of both advertising oriented studies and those which emphasize more comprehensive business functions. Thus, the first paper on social media “Facebook versus television: advertising value perceptions among females” is specific to advertising but the second social media paper “Consumer adoption of online collaborative customer co-design” focuses on the organic usage of new social media technology as the central feature of a company’s operating business model. Similarly the first mobile marketing paper “Location-based mobile advertisements & gender targeting” focuses on the new technologies as applied to traditional advertising goals while the second “Who are the users of mobile coupons? A profile of US consumers based on personal innovativeness” expands the focus to adoption of sales promotion coupons.

This inclusion of broader and more interactive types of business usage fits with the “Interactive Marketing” in our Journal’s name and also with the sense that increasingly it is less advisable to separate pure “advertising” from “marketing” and either from the broader integrated usage and experience of a company’s brand and services.

These papers show that research in this field can address areas of significant business interest, with huge commercial and managerial implications, and with a proper emphasis on how the many new electronic technologies can best be used as part of a company’s overall business operations. And as seen above with the paper focusing on the acceptance of a collaborative “create your own clothing” firm, more and more businesses are designing their entire business models around the application of web 2.0 and other social networking technologies. Further improvements in the new technology will accelerate this trend.

The papers in this Issue also demonstrate the challenges of doing research in the real world with complicated forms of social media and mobile marketing that are still rapidly evolving, ranging from patient health monitoring to financial and payment services to location based advertising and event alerts (MobiThinking.com, 2012). Such social media and mobile marketing services are often hazy in their design, their goals are ambitious and complex, and anticipated user actions are complicated. In more interactive forms of social media and mobile marketing, the behavior we label user “acceptance” may actually consist of a series of actions over time. Even continuing acceptance and satisfaction on the part of the user may still not meet the business goals of a service provider. For example, a free stock market alert service may have as its provider’s goal that users do more than just continue to use the service, but additionally sign up for premium services or click through to other sites paid for by advertisers, or a pharmaceutical manufacturer may offer a web application providing interactive lifestyle guidance and medication reminders with the goal of receiving feedback to fine tune their products and their marketing messages (Unger et al., 2012). Such factors conspire to make it less clear what kinds of intentions or actual behaviors to measure in such services. Additionally privacy controls and the reluctance of real world companies to give researchers access to their often tentative customers, make it difficult to assess in a rigorous controlled fashion the perceptions and behaviors of actual customers under differing experimental conditions.

Thus, the studies reported in this issue predominantly depend on attitude or perceptual measures collected from convenience samples – in most cases college students who responded to a recruitment mailing – who are exposed to well controlled stimuli scenarios such as a screen shot of a web site or descriptions of a situation in which they receive a text offer, and/or asked about themselves and their general attitudes and perceptions about social media. By avoiding the frequent confounding of variables found in real situations, these studies have allowed the testing of hypotheses based on important existing models such as the Technology Acceptance Model (Davis, 1989), and the Advertising Value Model (Ducoffe, 1995) and their extension to include new relevant variables. However, at the end of the day, we are still dealing mainly with faux users and attitudes and intentions about simulated situations, and with existing frameworks that view acceptance as a one-time discrete behaviour, and not dealing enough with complex behaviours such as impact and long term usage.

Yet expanding knowledge of how actual customers perceive and use the mobile and social media initiatives of business is important, and is consistent with recent concerns about both advertising effectiveness, and the need especially in online advertising to better understand outcomes in terms of consumers evaluation of the advertising experience and its benefits (Pavlou and Steward, 2000).

Given the early stage of the field of mobile and social media and its growing integration with other aspects of business, there is a need to both study more deeply and in more naturalistic research settings what kinds of features “work well” in practice with their intended users and also to study what business models work well for their sponsors and why. We need to go beyond testing existing models to also infusing the field with new ideas about how people assimilate, value, and use multi-faceted services. This will mean more asking actual users (even if this is difficult to arrange, poorly or not at all controlled and randomized, and not always guided by pre-existing conceptual models) about the details of their “lived experience” (Van Manen, 1990) such as how they use interactive advertising and social media in their “work flow”, using less structured data collection formats and seeking out from users (both “customers” and the providers of mobile and social services) their theories of what is occurring, and then refining this into testable hypotheses.

It is important for academe to support these kinds of naturalistic studies because they are exploring new and emerging topics that have great significance, and once the territory is charted a bit, can be backed up with more exacting quantitative studies. There are many ways this can be achieved, but one model for doing this is suggested by Mendlinger and Cwikel (2008) in the field of public health research in developing countries. In their “double helix” approach, quantitative Likert style survey data and qualitative open ended interviews are done iteratively to test quantitative relationships in models, provide insight on what may be happening to guide further work, and provide clues on limitations to the accuracy of their experimental designs in difficult to control field settings.

Mobile and social media are radically changing the field of interactive marketing, and also increasing its importance. We do not want our desire to be “scientific” to lead to the situation where we overly look for experimental situations and subject definitions which facilitate precise research, possibly to the detriment of not enough exploring in an open-ended fashion and in realistic settings poorly understood but important problems. A similar problem has been reported in the cancer research field, where some observers believe that “easier to measure and get results” – and easier to fund – mouse based knockout gene studies and similar types of research have been favored to the detriment of lengthy and difficult to do – but critically important – research on mechanisms of metastasis in humans (Leaf, 2004). Appropriately augmenting tightly controlled quantitative studies with broader scope qualitative investigations may together allow for the fastest overall progress in research on interactive marketing.

Barry UngerBoston University, Boston Massachusetts, USA