eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

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The main objective of this research is to discover determinants of consumer intentions to redeem coupons which are sent to mobile phones (mobile coupons) by using the adoption models which exploit cognitive and social theories of decision making. Mobile marketing communication has been used greatly but the lack of understanding the consumer has made it unattractive in both companies’ and consumers’ point of view. The study aims to fill this gap especially in the mobile coupon field by trying to find out the validated model and determinants which influence on the consumer. To wider the perspective this research investigates whether there are differences between the consumers who have already used mobile coupons and consumers who have never used them. The practical aim of this study is to provide consumer behavior recommendations about the mobile coupons to small and medium sized companies as well as future entrepreneurs.

The purpose of data collection was to find the same kind of profile of respondents which other mobile coupon researchers have used. In this way, comparison with the previous analyses could be made in the Finnish context. The three previous studies (Hsu et al., 2006; Dickinger and Kleijnen, 2008; Jayasingh and Eze, 2010) focused on the general profile of mobile service users who are primarily young and well-educated people (A.T. Kearney, 2011). The questionnaire was sent to 250 persons in Facebook and 190 responses were received. The research model and formulated hypotheses were tested using the structural equation modeling to determine whether relationships exist between the determinants. In addition, analysis of variance was used to explain the statistical differences between the consumers who have used mobile coupons and consumers who have not used them.

The results of research highlight the importance of understanding the consumer. The results showed that the subjective norm, perceived control and attitude explained directly 81 per cent of the intention to redeem mobile coupons. The attitude with its indirect determinants accounted for 67 percent of the redeeming intention. Among the indirect determinants, the economic benefit was the most significant and hereafter came the non-economic benefit and entertainment. The redemption effort was the only determinant in the research model which was not significant. Furthermore, the differences between the consumers who have already used mobile coupons and consumers who have never used them were explored. The results showed that there were statistically significant differences in all determinants despite one. This determinant was the perceived control. The study also showed that the previously used group thought overall more positively about the mobile coupons than never used group.