SMS-Marketing : A Study of Consumer Saturation Using an Extended TAM Approach

The aim of this paper is to explore consumers’ attitudes toward mobile marketing, and more precisely toward SMS marketing messages. An exploratory study has been conducted with 136 phone users. The study examines their use of mobile phone as well as their acceptance of SMS messaging, using a transposition of the Technology Acceptance Model and tries to assess whether a saturation point is reached above which SMS marketing would be non-efficient and even counter-productive. The results indicate that the gender of respondents, the frequency of use and the length of use significantly influence the sender-specific saturation level, representing potential segmentation variables for the market of mobile phone users. However these results need to be confirmed by further research, which might attempt to identify other relevant and managerially usable segmentation variables