Current Issue Summary
Dec 2020 (Vol. 60, Issue 4):

Advertising on Mobile Apps vs. the Mobile Web: Which Delivers Better Advertisement Recognition and Willingness to Buy?
In their research, Sungjun (Steven) Park (National Chengchi University, Taipei) and Byungho Park (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology College of Business), noted that mobile users now represent the majority of the world’s population. Accordingly, companies are expected to spend about $187 billion on digital marketing in 2022 (eMarketer, 2018). From the authors’ standpoint, these trends begged the question: “Do consumers process mobile advertising on mobile websites and branded apps in the same way?” Surveying consumers in South Korea to study advertising recognition and willingness to buy new products, Park and Park examined both the antecedents and consequences of mobile websites and branded apps. The study used real brands and controlled for brand effects in a structural equation model. (Steven Park coauthored this research when at Samsung Electronics in Gyeonggi-do, South Korea).

As antecedents, cognitive innovativeness affected consumers’ usage of branded apps, whereas sensory innovativeness affected their usage of both mobile apps and websites. “When setting a segmentation strategy, for example, (advertisers should take into consideration that) app users likely have both sensory and cognitive innovativeness, whereas mobile web users are only sensory innovators,” the authors write. Indeed, gathering psychographic and behavioral insights also may be useful for brand custodians, in order to identify customer needs. And, understanding the role of sensory and cognitive innovation could be an important new frontier for marketers to explore further in the mobile space.

Drawing on data provided by 382 survey respondents, the authors found:

• Branded apps help consumers recognize ads more than mobile websites do.
• Branded apps can increase consumers’ willingness to buy more than mobile websites.
• Advertising on popular apps may not be as effective as advertising on branded apps, because the findings show that ad recognition does not mediate between advertising on popular apps and the willingness to buy new products.
• It’s better to target consumers with high cognitive and sensory innovativeness to increase the customer base of branded apps.
• Apps should be a “top priority in mobile marketing,” with branded tools offering particular benefits.

Read the full article here