Development of a mobile advertising application for Kenyan businesses: a case study of Mr. Price clothing Store

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Mobile Telecommunications and InnovationThe main goal for advertising is to increase sales of the advertised product. An advertisement portrays a particular product in an attractive way so that the product may draw the customer’s attention. An advertisement seeks to convince the consumer that the product is the best choice for the consumer. The current mediums of advertisements being used in Kenya are billboards, newspapers, flyers, radio announcements and advertising through websites on the internet.The aforementioned media of adverting bring with them a number of challenges and the main challenge being high costs of advertising. While this may not be the case for advertising through a website, advertising through the internet faces the problem of customer reach as not all consumers can access the internet all the time to keep themselves updated with the current products being sold. The issue of high costs has made most businesses shy away from advertising themselves since they cannot afford the high costs that are brought along with these traditional mediums of advertising.This dissertation presents the analysis of the Rapid Application Development methodology and development of a mobile advertising application system for businesses in Kenya. The Rapid Application development was considered the suitable methodology for this dissertation because of the time constraint and the methodology’s flexibility to accommodate customer’s changing requirements. The dissertation objectives are; to develop a mobile advertising application for Mr Price clothing store. To test the mobile advertising application developed and to investigate the customer attitude towards the developed mobile advertising application. The investigation of customer attitudes towards the mobile application was done by conducting a survey. The survey was conducted on the customers of Mr Price clothing store. The customers had a positive attitude towards the mobile advertising application and they indicated that they would recommend the application to their friends. The dissertation was carried out successfully and it was indicated that the mobile advertising application would be well received by the Mr Price clothing stores customers. From the study the customers indicate that the developed application is a reliable and efficient platform to showcase products from Mr. Price store. The customers also suggested that the application should have an M-Pesa feature and a reservation feature to make purchase easier