Abstract

In the era of information communication technology (ICT) outbreaks, there is a sharp increase in the number of people using cell phone in every single day all over the world, in particular, in Hochiminh city which is the largest city and also one of the country’s most important cultural and educational centers in Vietnam. Many of Vietnamese businesses have been catching up with this trend with the purpose of maximizing their profit by using advertisements on mobile so as to grow the volume of the products and services sold. This study aims at releasing more aspects of the customer’s attitude towards mobile advertising in Ho Chi Minh City. Through which marketers can have a look into the real scenario of the customer’s attitude on mobile advertising. The study is used secondary data only with a conceptual framework outlined to do the research. There are four main distinguish factors hypothesized: entertainment, informativeness, irritation, credibility which have huge influence on consumer’ attitude. This research has been using data surveyed basing on the previous studies of many Vietnamese and foreigners having the same topic to analyze more specifically on the case of Hochiminh city. Hence, these selected data have been analyzed to find out the lack of some factors in the previous studies and also have some recommendations for marketing strategies to launch several effective applications on mobile device. The result presents the importance of mobile advertising for a product or service, yet users haven’t clearly expressed their positiveness. The surprising factors directly affect consumer attitude are credibility and entertainment in the advertisements in good ways. In the other hand, irritation causes negative attitude. With the limitations of tools required, also some suggestions are provided for further studies. However, this brief research could help businesses make right decisions and generate more strategic plans for sustainable development of businesses in today competitive market.

Acknowledgement

After several intensive months embracing myself with my dissertation, I am writing this note to thanks for all of supports during that hard time. It has been a focusing period of time self-study to complete my last assignment in university. The dissertation definitely has had big impact on me on account of broadening my specialized knowledge at business. Now, I wish to give my gratitude for these who have supported me with both spiritual and physical to overcome this term.

Firstly, I want to give sincere thanks to my mates from my university since their enthusiastic collaboration. You were always willing there to supported me in need. I particularly want to show my appreciation to my supervisor_Dr. Nguyen Xuan Minh for his devoted help for all the chances I had to study further at my university’s library.

Hence, I would like to express gratitude on my tutors_ mr Nguyen Hung Cuong for his valuable instruction. You kindly educated me with solid foundation knowledge in order to have the right direction in finishing my dissertation successfully.

Eventually, I would also like to thank to my parents for their sympathy and counsel. You are always there for me. Finally, my friends are always surrounded by and support me by deliberating over our problems and findings.

Tables of content

I. INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………….6

1.1 Background ……………………………………………………………..6

1.2 Research questions ………………………………………………….7                  1.3 Purpose……………………………………………………….7

II. LITERATURE REVIEW ………………………………………………………..8

2.1 Attitude………………………………………………………..8

2.2 Mobile advertising …………………………………………………….9

2.3 Company’s attitude towards mobile advertising ……………10

2.4 Consumer’s attitude towards mobile advertising……………11   2.5 Informativeness…………………………………………….. 13

2.6 Entertainment…………………………………………………………..13   2.7 Irritation…………………………………………………………………..14

2.8 Credibility………………………………………………………………..15

III. MOTHOEDOLOGY……………………………………………………………..15

3.1 Research framework………………………………………………..15                 3.2 Data collection method……………………………………………..16

IV. RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS ……………………………………………….17

4.1 Descriptive statistics  ………………………………………………..17

4.2 Data analysis……………………………………………………………19

4.3 Discussion……………………………………………………21

V. CONCLUSION ……………………………………………………………………23                 5.1 Summary and contribution…………………………………………23                                          5.2 Managerial implications……………………………………………..24                                                         5.3 Limitation and further research …………………………………..25

VI. LIST OF REFERENCES………………………………………………………..25

APPENDIX……………………………………………………………..29

I/ INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background

Many of expertises argued that the strong relationship between using portable device habit and doing shopping has led to the consequence that impulse entrepreneurs to penetrate into the market to understand how to so as to do business more successfully ( Javid, Namin, Noorai, 2012). Mobile devices these days play a vital role not only for people development in many fields, but also in doing business with the purpose of doing marketing online. Many economists believe that doing marketing on mobile device has been considering as an effective mode of marketing to create new circumstances at the fastest speed, regardless the geography problems for doing businesses. It’s absolutely a big chance that any enterprises want to take advantage of. Just well over 2.1 billion commercials are shown on movable devices every day (Kemp, 2012). With large level of expansion, mobile adverts could conveniently approach audience, places and careers (Wilska, 2003). For the purpose of attracting more customers and increase the good influences of advertisements, tons of studies about the relationship of consumer attitudes and mobile adverts have been carried on in plenty of places, but in HoChiMInh city, Vietnam.

While, following the development of all over the world, in Vietnam, just well over 50 %of resident is using mobile phones with an award trend in the near future (2015). This apparently led to the change of customer’s habits over the time. Here is a convincing proof to illustrate that Vietnamese have the habit of using mobile device for almost of their time in a day (4,5h/day), moreover, half of them are using mobile for shopping online.

So, there is a big difference between mobile advertising and traditional ones. Whilst the traditional marketing like adverts on Tv or streets events tend to approach target groups who affected by the crowd, mobile advertising aims at every single person. Moreover, the advertisements through the mobile phones can send to their consumers at the right time at any social status, individual preferences, and location. It is obviously essential to do a research on the effects of advertising attribute on consumer attitudes. With basic foundation of previous studies, this finding is developed and expanded by doing a research on consumer’s attitude in HoChiMinh City. Then the result would be evaluated on the influence Vietnamese consumer buying decision. Additional findings regarding to market of Vietnam mobile users are also proposed basing on the five hypotheses highlighted in previous studies.

This paper consists of five main sections including the (I) Introduction, (II) Literature Review, (III) Research Methods, (IV) Results and Analysis, and (V) Conclusion.

1.2 Research question

a. what are the customer’s attitude to mobile advertising?

b. What are the factors of mobile advertising affecting customer‘s attitude?

c. How these factors influence on customer’s attitude?

1.3 Purpose

This research aims at three main objectives: firstly, to identify factors affecting Vietnamese attitudes toward mobile advertising, particularly in HochiMInh city. Secondly, this measures the effectiveness of mobile advertising and determines which factors are the most important to success of mobile advertising. Finally, after the determined factor is identified, advertisers, marketing manager, strategic planners could apply in many cases: website and mobile applications (Tsang, Ho, & Liang, 2004) so as to create more effective marketing strategies and advertising designs to apply it in Hochiminh city, Vietnam’s market successfully.

II/ LITERATURE REVIEW

Many of definitions of the concepts of mobile marketing have been gone through out the time. Mobile marketing is a form of using wireless technology to approach target customers by sending integrated messages of a product or a service in a direct way (Altuna and Konuk (2009), Plavini and Durgesh (2011).

Yang (Yang, 2007) stated that because of its mobility features, this would be easily popular as the internet marketing. To catch up with the future development, there are many kinds of mobile advertising has been changing. According to Tsang et al (2004), mobile websites and in mobile applications are the two most common kinds of recent advertising, so that this research will mainly concentrate on. Mobile advertisements operate as a system of interactions between businesses and consumers. Step by step and in order, these are following activities: Businesses take advantage of the factors of the mobile advertising to promote the brand and to approach closer to their target customer. Through agencies, they propose advertising ideas and let them create ads on the company’s website, or create an interesting shopping app on the phone with unexpected promotion to attract customers. Last but not least, the advertisement will come to potential consumers.

 2.1 Attitudes

In psychology, attitude inhere person. They are very complex with tons of tones which are stated through experiences. Attitude has an impact on individual’s decision, and actions responded to challenges, and rewards (Business Dictionary). According to Tsang et al (2004), attitude is a psychological state to establish the way they get from surround environment and show them how to react. For the purpose of earning the highest profit of any business, understanding their customer attitude is a must do. Here we can see on the chart, the theory ABC model of Solomon (2008) relating to attitude:

It comprises the three elements: affect, behavior, and cognition, which emphasizes the interrelationship among knowing, feeling and doing. When it comes to business, Affect can be understood by the negative or positive feelings of a consumer about products, while behavior causes motive to urge customers to do take action. The definition of cognition in business can clearly perceived that is consumer’s believes in a product. These factors have very strong interrelationships. Keep moving to future trend, there are also lost of theories about attitude such as Aaker, Kumar and Day (2000) to renovate the idea of Solomon with more specific factors to an object: cognitive compares with knowledge, affective vs liking and intention or action.

2.2 Mobile advertising

It’s a form of advertising through mobile devices or wireless marketing. It also argued as messages for business to transfer to customer (B2C) (Okazaki & Charles, 2008). Mobile advertising can be text ads through SMS, or banner adverts which inserted in mobile websites, downloadable applications or mobile games with the aim of strengthening companies’ brand identity, particularly, integrated marketing communication strategies. Many of previous researches exposed the huge effect of consumer feelings on mobile promotions on the final decision to buy goods (Churchill & Iacobucci, 2002; Okazaki, 2004; Radder, Grandcolas, & Deakins, 2005; Yang, 2007). On the other hand, in order to boost the good effect of each other on target consumer, mobile promotions should wisely combine with traditional tools (Kavassalis et al., 2003), although both of them are new concepts in the commercial operation. Hence consumers would properly prefer spending time getting own integrated approach on cellphone and have intention to comfortably see surprising mobile advertisements appeared (Bauer et al., 2005).

2.3 Company’s Attitude towards Mobile Advertising

Company’s attitude is just one link in the chain of mobile advertising toward consumer’s mood. Following the trend of Technology development, brand manager would do marketing campaigns through the advertising agency. By their general ideas, the mobile advertising network might serve as a distributor to release advertisements on portable websites or applications to their target customers (Le et al., 2014). Through these unique channels, marketer could analyze their customer attitude for their products. By this, they could have a better understanding about customer, as a consequence, they could go further to achieve their goals in each stages of their company brand health check. Mobile advertising comes along with the sharp development of IT would bring huge benefit for even small companies in the future.

2.4 Customers’ Attitude towards Mobile Advertising

Many of previous researches presented the strong coherent of customer’ mindset towards mobile commercials and responses to precise adverts. According to MacKenzie & Lutz (1989), consumer’s attitude cause an essential control on advertising effectiveness on account of the relationships between attitudes associated and mobile advertising is absolutely positive (Ajzen and Fishbein (1980). On the contrary, in the research of Le and Nguyen (2014), he argued that not many users have good feelings on incidental advertisements exposed; though they cannot deny strong impacts of mobile commercials. Audiences would be eager to watch the advertisements and easily influenced to attract on products on the condition that advertisement must contains appealing messages, especially; focusing on credibility and entertainment. This study uses various dimensions to evaluate customer attitudes towards advertising via mobile devices. Agreeing with this point, Saeed et al. (2013) have found that at first glance, consumers commonly have an unfavorable feeling toward the advertisements. This research highlighted the different people would response differently upon receiving the mobile advertising. Strongly depends on message characteristics, advertising on mobile devices have an eternal result on attitude. There are some emotional sectors (Informativeness, Entertainment and Irritation) influencing on how shoppers evaluate the quality of an advertising (Ducoffe, 1996). Furthermore, general attitudes also revealed consumers’ assessments in this finding. In order to strengthen this, in 2001, Cyberspace advertisements vs. other media channels (Bracket & Carr, 2001) examined on one more factors (Credibility).

Table 1

Previous studies of attitudes toward advertising