بازاریابی موبایل: راهی به جلو  Mobile Marketing: The Way Forward

The four articles featured in this special issue address four themes related to these questions: mobile advertising, mobile promotions, gamification in mobile, and mobile shopper marketing. These articles originated in a Thought Leadership Conference (TLC) organized in January 2015 by the Center for Retailing Studies at the Mays Business School, Texas A&M University. Each article addresses the following questions pertaining to its substantive focus: What key issues on this topic merit research and managerial attention? What do we know from prior research about these issues? What framework can we use to organize these issues to enrich our understanding? What unknowns exist from research and managerial standpoints? What are the ways to move forward in continuing investigations to obtain more insights? The co-authors of each article in this special issue are leading academic experts and senior executives in the area of mobile marketing. While the collaboration among academics has produced the anticipated excellent insights, the role of executives is a special aspect of each article. The executives have acted as a good bridge between the academic and practitioner communities. They have helped focus the article on key managerial questions such as: What issues on their topic keep managers awake? What decisions related to their topic are important? How do managers currently make these decisions? What frameworks, tools, and insights on their topic will be most helpful to make these decisions? To provide some guidance to readers of this special issue, I provide a broad overview of selected topics and perspectives presented in the articles. An essential aspect of mobile marketing is mobile communication, which includes mobile advertising and mobile promotion. Grewal et al. (2016) offer an overview of mobile advertising that can be viewed as providing relevant messages on a small screen to consumers with limited attention span. Extant research on mobile advertising and promotions (e.g., Bart, Stephen, and Sarvary 2014) has looked at specific issues in mobile advertising. Taking a broad view, Grewal et al. (2016) argue that mobile advertising’s performance depends on several variables organized by the environment, consumer, firm, market and technology factors, advertising goals, and the use of appropriate mobile ad elements. Their framework helps to organize existing knowledge and outline future research avenues in mobile advertising.