ABSTRACT

Although innovations such as mobile marketing offer targeting and a cost-effective approach to marketing that could be leveraged by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), most SMEs have shown a noticeable skepticism toward adopting the innovation. To overcome this adoption inertia, more research is necessary. This study draws on an integrated framework with theoretical considerations from the technology–organization–environment (TOE) framework to examine how factors in the technology context (relative advantage, complexity, and compatibility), the organizational context (top management support, financial resource slack, and employee mobile marketing capability) and the environmental context (mobile marketing vendor support, competitive pressure, and customer pressure) predict marketing adoption behavior by South African SMEs. Using a comparative analysis, the study further ascertains whether industry variance moderates the factors predicting mobile marketing adoption behavior between manufacturing and tourism-sector SMEs. Data for the empirical testing of the integrated framework were randomly sourced from 201 SMEs in the manufacturing and tourism sectors. The results show that relative advantage, complexity, top management support, competitive pressure, and vendor support are key drivers of mobile marketing adoption in the overall sample of manufacturing and tourism sector SMEs in South Africa. However, the results not only show different set predictors of mobile marketing adoption between the manufacturing and tourism sector SMEs: they also emphasize that the relative importance of the salient determinants of the innovation’s adoption varies across the industries, suggesting that industry variance plays a significant moderating role in mobile marketing adoption decisions across the two SME sectors that are examined. The implications of the findings for researchers and practitioners interested in promoting a more favorably disposed adoption of mobile marketing at the SME interface are discussed.

摘要

尽管移动营销等创新提供了中小型企业 (SME) 可以利用的定位和具有成本效益的营销方法，但大多数 SME 对采用这种创新表现出明显的怀疑态度。为了克服这种采用惯性，需要更多的研究。本研究利用技术-组织-环境 (TOE) 框架中的理论考虑的综合框架来研究技术背景（相对优势、复杂性和兼容性）、组织背景（高层管理支持、财务资源松弛）中的因素如何和员工移动营销能力）和环境背景（移动营销供应商支持、竞争压力和客户压力）预测南非中小企业的营销采用行为。通过比较分析，该研究进一步确定了行业差异是否会调节预测制造业和旅游部门中小企业之间移动营销采用行为的因素。综合框架的实证检验数据随机来自制造业和旅游业的 201 家中小企业。结果表明，在南非制造业和旅游业中小企业的整体样本中，相对优势、复杂性、高层管理支持、竞争压力和供应商支持是移动营销采用的关键驱动因素。然而，结果不仅显示了制造业和旅游业中小企业之间移动营销采用的不同集合预测因素：他们还强调了创新采用的显着决定因素的相对重要性因行业而异，表明行业差异在所检查的两个中小企业部门的移动营销采用决策中起着重要的调节作用。讨论了调查结果对有兴趣在中小企业界面促进更有利地采用移动营销的研究人员和从业者的影响。