| Summary: | 博士 === 臺灣大學 === 商學研究所 === 98 === Because of the prevalence and popularity of mobile advertising in recent years, it has become the fifth media following newspapers, radio, TV, and the Internet. It provides companies and ad agencies with a new channel for low-cost and quick marketing communication. However, as many consumers consider mobile advertisements as junk mail, mobile advertising has mixed results. This study delivers a teaser ad via mobile Short Message Service (SMS), also referred to as text messaging, to test whether mobile advertising is an effective channel for teaser advertising. The authors focus on the construct of consumer curiosity and conduct six experiments to investigate the effects of possible curiosity clues, including brand familiarity, spokesperson likeability, spokesperson familiarity, ad interactivity, incentives, and the degree of personalization, on the curious responses of consumers with different SMS attitudes and their subsequent intentions to interact with the firm as well as to save the SMS ad.
The authors treat brand familiarity as the core variable throughout this paper. The research can be divided into three major parts, and each part consists of two experiments. The first part discusses how spokesman likeability (Experiment 1) or familiarity (Experiment 2) interacts with brand familiarity in affecting consumer curiosity and subsequent behavioral intentions. The second part returns to the fundamentals of the curiousity theory; it focuses on brand familiarity and spokesperson familiarity, in an attempt to confirm that consumers’ curious responses are truly evoked by the size of the information gap. The second part also focuses on furthering the understanding of the effects of mobile teaser advertising and its possible functional situations. That is, its effects are extended to advertising persuasion (Experiment 3) and two continuous waves of teaser ads as the research situation (Experiment 4). The third part combines the characteristics of mobile advertising and discusses the interactive relationship among ad interactivity, incentives (Experiment 5), the degree of personalization (Experiment 6), and brand familiarity.
The experimental results reveal the following. (1) Brand familiarity, spokesperson likeability/familiarity, and ad interactivity positively affect “what people already know,” thus reducing the information gap. (2) Incentives and the degree of personalization in ads have a positive impact on “what people want to know”; however, only the latter clearly expands the information gap. (3) Consumers’ curious responses are generated by the information gap. A medium-sized information gap could lead to greater curiosity than a big-sized or a small-sized gap. Moreover, big-sized and bigger-sized information gaps generate similar curious responses. (4) Curious responses will improve consumers’ intentions to interact with the firm and save the SMS ad. Besides, positive advertising effects occur following the generation of curiosity. (5) Consumers’ SMS attitudes and brand familiarity are important moderators that determine whether mobile teaser ads will produce the intended effects. The curious clues work, that is, they affect the curious responses and the size of the information gap, only when consumers have favorable SMS attitudes. Moreover, a mobile teaser ad for a high-familiarity brand could also attract consumers’ attention and motivate them to process the advertisement. (6) Using two continuous waves of teaser ads through the SMS medium will negatively affect consumers’ ad and product attitudes. Instead, companies could use one wave of mobile teaser ads and simultaneously disclose the brand and spokesperson factors. (7) Generally speaking, undergraduate students do not like to receive mobile advertising, which manifests the importance of ad content design.
On the basis of the curiosity theory, this paper combines the research domains of mobile advertising and teaser advertising, proposes a new advertising channel (i.e., mobile teaser advertising), and integrates the concepts of interactivity and personalization, which have been emphasized by many scholars. Therefore, the findings of the current paper contribute to the research domains mentioned above. In addition, the paper provides important pragmatic suggestions for companies that want to use SMS ads in their marketing communication efforts.
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