My Co-author Michael Hanley and I contributed a chapter to Teemu Kautonen's book Trust and New Technologies: Marketing and Management on the Internet and Mobile Media.

Introduction

In recent years the adoption of mobile phones and associated voice and data wireless services has swelled, a trend that does not seem to be slowing. Today, there are more than 227 million mobile subscribers in the United States (75 percent of the population), up from 208 million in 2005 and 182 million in 2004 (CTIA, 2006), and more than 2.5 billion mobile subscribers

worldwide. In many industrial countries it is commonplace to see mobile penetration rates exceeding 100 per cent. Current predictions estimate mobile subscriptions to surpass 3.5 billion worldwide by 2008, with much of the growth coming from emerging markets.

The growth trend of mobile services adoption has not been overlooked by marketers. Many marketers have recognized that engaging consumers through the mobile channel with personalized, informative and entertaining mobile and mobile-enhanced, traditional media marketing initiatives (Bauer et al., 2005; Becker, 2005; Leppäniemi et al., 2006) can be an effective means of increasing brand awareness, lead generation and revenue. Mobile marketing is no longer a fad; it is here to stay. Mobile marketing programs will proliferate as more marketers employ mobile and mobile-enhanced traditional media programs (Becker, 2005) to engage their target audiences. Gerry Purdy, a leading mobile industry analyst, notes that ‘the most important medium for advertising in the 21st century is going to be the cell phone, not print media, not billboards . . .’ (Purdy, 2006).

Marketers are also beginning to recognize that the mobile channel far surpasses any other marketing channel’s ability to capture consumer data for the purposes for marketing and consumer profiling. As Fish (2007) points out: our mobile device is not only with us, it is increasingly part of us; it has become for many users the most personal thing. The mobile device . . . can capture your ‘Digital Footprint,’ which is our daily actions and activities – when we start moving in the morning, what information was searched, requested or delivered, where we have been, where we stayed and for how long. Relationship analysis using our contact base would detail who we were with and who was nearby. Other ‘Screens of Life’ will be unable to repeat this data collection feat, at best a fixed access Web model may get 10 percent of the available data of your daily pattern TV maybe 1 percent, but the mobile device opens the possibility of 90 percent.

Read the complete chapter here.