Outlining a New Approach to Study Mobile Marketing: Relevancy as a Primary Mediating Construct to Understand Mobile Advertising Effectiveness

Mobile Marketing is a relatively new field. Many articles attempt to understand, define, encapsulate, find best practices, and describe marketing use applications on mobile devices. A significant part of the research on mobile marketing and mobile advertising focuses on the technology or functionality perspective, i.e., QR Codes, MMS and SMS, APPS, and Smart Tags/Proximity technology implementations, User Interface, and Payments to name a few. Researchers try to understand how consumers' attitudes are formed and influenced by Mobile Marketing, in many cases using models that studied technology acceptance (TAM, UTAUT, etc.). The authors contend that there is a critical misconception in the study of Mobile Marketing. It is argued here that different from extant research, "mobile" in the context of "mobile marketing" is not a technology, it is a medium. That medium can be highly customized, even considered as a one to one conversation. Consequently, different from current research, it is claimed here that consumer intention, acceptance, and redemption of mobile offers are affected directly not by technological, situational, or contextual factors, but through a primary mediating construct: Relevancy or "Agent R". Drawing concepts from the Relevance Theory we offer a new perspective on how to study the effects of mobile advertising on consumer behavior; opening a new field of study, that will focus on how to enhance the "Agent R" construct. We theorize that previously studied factors that affect mobile consumer's behavior are antecedents of the "Agent R" and that without relevancy all those factors are immaterial. This change of paradigm on the investigation of mobile advertising will have direct practical consequences too. The Holy Grail of marketers will be to find ways to win the relevance game, enhancing immediate customer value and improving return on advertising expenditures.