Privacy is most important to South African cellular users, who want to be able to request information rather than have advertisers pushing it onto them, says a study.
Research by an MBA student, at the University of Cape Town's Graduate School of Business, finds that, while cellular phones have a huge potential for businesses to build new links with their customers, a lot more needs to be done to educate consumers and how businesses need to engage them.
The study, done by Barbara Grantham for her thesis and supervised by senior lecturer Hamieda Parker, says that the low costs and benefits of receiving useful information, such as product photographs and videos, are popular, but consumers need to be informed more explicitly why they should sign up for information downloads.
A main objective of the study was to determine the extent to which multimedia mobile applications can offer a suitable alternative or complement existing information and communication media - both within the consumer setting and corporate environment.
Waiting to be exploited
Two mobile applications were tested, video-to-mobile downloads and mobizines - mini magazines that can be downloaded onto personal handsets (which, since the research, have been developed into WAP site applications and no longer require software to be downloaded onto a phone).
Grantham's study says the potential of these applications as mediums for conveying useful and relevant information to consumers has not yet been fully exploited.
"The study suggests that this is because consumers rarely understand the value or benefit of information downloads until they experience such applications for themselves and are thus hesitant to give them a try," she says.
Grantham says cellphones offer many advantages over traditional information mediums - they can be taken anywhere, they demand attention more successfully than mass media, they are personal and they can now feature the entire range of multimedia capability - sound, text, picture and video, making them highly entertaining and appealing.
In response to these benefits, the arena of mobile marketing - or marketing to consumers via their cellphones - is rapidly growing in SA.
"But it is one thing to have an SMS advertisement sent to you without requesting it, and entirely another to convince consumers to actually request - or 'pull' - information which can then be downloaded onto their phones. This is much harder to do," Grantham says.
Grantham's quantitative study used two testing methods - traditional concept testing, where consumers were presented with a verbal description of the attributes and benefits of mobile applications; and prototype testing, where consumers received the verbal description in addition to experiencing the application firsthand.
Increasing buy-in
Far more positive responses were received from those people who were presented with the video-to-mobile and mobizine prototypes than those who were presented with the concepts only. The study also shows strong evidence that experiencing the application appears to significantly increase user buy-in.
Those who were presented with the concept only were far more sceptical.
"The concept-test respondents were also more concerned about issues of privacy, cost and phone compatibility. These issues were less of a concern to those who saw the technology work firsthand," Grantham says.
She says these results have important implications for the marketing industry. If there is to be any major uptake of information downloads in the consumer market, businesses will have to invest in new ways to engage consumers and overcome misconceptions. Until then, downloads are likely to remain solely within the realm of entertainment - where the benefits to consumers are more obvious.
Grantham says this would be a missed opportunity because the advantages of information downloads to both businesses and consumers are numerous. In particular, information downloads can save consumers money and time when making a purchasing decision - especially an important one like buying a house or a car.
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