An Analysis on How Mobile Advertising Influences Young People's Buying Behavior

Introduction

This project investigates how mobile advertising influences young people’s buying behavior , taking into consideration various forms of mobile advertising. However the aim of this research is to conduct in-depth analysis in order to determine which type of mobile advertising affects young people the most and identify the reasons why it plays such a significant role in influencing consumers’ decision-making processes. The way/s in which products and services are promoted through this kind of mobile advertising will be analyzed. This project focuses mainly on four types of online advertisements, namely E-mail advertising, pop-up advertising, interstitial advertising and social media marketing. The reason why mobile advertising was chosen as the central topic of this research is because mobile technologies are becoming an increasingly essential part of people’s everyday life. For instance, recent statistics suggest that in 2014, nearly 20% of the U.S. population owned an iPhone (Statista, 2015). IPhone’s are remarkably advanced, convenient and easy to use thanks to their single home button and wide touch screen (Apple, 2015). iPhone’s are incredibly popular in the United Kingdom as well, were IPhone sales account for 39.5 per cent of Britain’s mobile sales, which represents the Californian company’s highest ever UK market share (Williams, 2014). Young people are particularly sensitive to advanced technology and consider the Internet as an essential tool to perform a variety of activities and tasks. For instance, numerous young consumers play online games such as candy crush, jelly bear and clash of clans, which require users to be connected to the Internet; moreover, if players access such gaming platforms through their Facebook accounts, they can connect with their friends and play with them. Also, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are very popular APPs among young people, as they enable users to stay in touch with their friends and be informed about their friends and relatives’ life events in a very convenient and rapid way. In other words, convenience is one of the main benefits of mobile technologies. For example, people can use their mobile phones to kill time when they are bored, which is one of the reasons why people use their mobile phones very frequently. It follows that mobile advertising represents an excellent channel through which organizations can promote their products and services among young people.

Background

Mobile advertising is a form of advertising thanks to which adverts are shown on smartphones, tablet PCs as well as other wireless devices. There exist several forms of mobile adverts, including static adverts, rich media adverts, search adverts, mobile sites and applications featuring promotional messages either from the app developer or third parties (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2013). Large organizations like the Mobile Marketing Association have tried to develop a series of rules aimed at regulating and standardizing mobile adverts (Mobile Marketing Association, 2013). Mobile advertising is a field that is bound to keep growing at a fast pace for a number reasons. First of all, the number of mobile users around the world has been rising significantly during the past few years and is expected to keep growing in the future, Internet connectivity is becoming increasingly fast, screen resolution has improved, mobile publishers are using increasingly advanced ad placement strategies and consumers are using their mobile devices to perform more and more tasks (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2013; Statista, 2015). According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the advent of new technologies and techniques such as location-based advertising is likely to have a positive impact on mobile advertising (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2013). In order to gain a better understanding of the relationship between mobile advertising and profitability, suffice to say that by the end of the second quarter of 2014, Facebook’s advertising profit exceeded $2.68 billion, 62% of which came from mobile advertising (Facebook, 2014). However, with the continuous release of new mobile technologies, it is highly likely that organizations will feel the need to explore new multimedia solutions and that consumers’ needs will evolve on a periodical basis. Nielsen’s buyout of Telephia is an excellent example of this (Story, 2007).

As previously mentioned, this project analyses and explores four types of mobile advertising, which have been identified as the most common and popular forms of mobile advertising in view of the frequency with which they are used by organizations to promote their services and goods among young consumers. From a behavioral and psychological viewpoint, young people have a tendency to enjoy trying new things, play games, be interested in the latest trends and use social media platforms. However, mobile adverts always appear on gaming platforms, social networking websites and so on . In order to achieve relevant and useful results, this research will focus on these types of mobile adverts. The reason why this particular topic was selected for this study is because I believe that it will help me with my studies whilst producing interesting findings in relation to media marketing and advertising.

Structure

This research investigates how mobile advertising influences young people’s buying behavior and how products and services are promoted through mobile technologies by focusing on four types of mobile advertising. The Literature Review chapter analyses a variety of journal articles and books related to the topic being explored. Here, a number of advertising theories and concepts will be analyzed and critically linked with the research. The perspectives, theories and observations analyzed in this section will then be compared to the findings of this study. In addition the part of literature review will have short introduction and summary. The Methodology chapter explains why face-to-face qualitative interviews have been selected as the most suitable research method for this paper. There are will give to twenty sample of surveys. The selected sample consists of young people, thanks to which the author will collect primary data. This section also explains how participants were interviewed, how data is collected and how it is analyzed. The Findings section illustrates the results of the research, which will be analyzed from two different perspectives, namely mobile advertising and advertising strategy. Finally, the Conclusion section summarizes the findings of the research and illustrates its limitations.