eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

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This study provides insight into the use of entrepreneurial marketing in the mobile app context, with aim of answering the research question: how can entrepreneurial marketing can be used to affect mobile application adoption and retention? The motivation for the study stems from the lack of research on entrepreneurial marketing in the mobile application context and the scarcity of research on mobile application marketing. A thorough review of studies relating to entrepreneurial marketing, mobile commerce, mobile advertising and mobile applications was conducted in order to establish the theoretical foundations of this study. On the basis of the literature review the I-A-R framework was constructed which explores marketing through customer intelligence, acquisition and retention.

Netnography was utilized to study experts across four company blogs. These blogs present North American companies that offer services and/or platforms related to mobile app marketing mainly to small and medium sized enterprises. Due to the large amount of data, the findings were first categorized according to the I-A-R framework, and then a summarized and presented along with a revised framework.

The revised framework presents a four stage mobile app marketing process. These stages represent the app developer's approach towards making apps, the development of the app, user acquisition, and user retention. In terms of the research question, the two most important ways that EM can be used in the mobile app context are: creating apps that users have an incentive to share in order to leverage a small marketing budget for user acquisition and establishing relationships as a customer loyalty strategy.