Consumers' Attitude and Perception towards Short Message Service (SMS) Advertising through Mobile Phones

In India there are over 1170 million mobile subscribers and it is increasing day by day. This has paved the way for many companies of goods and services in the state to manage their sales promotions through the mobile telephone platform. SMS marketing is one of the most popular kinds of mobile marketing. The present research investigates consumer"s attitude and perception towards SMS advertising and a descriptive research design is made to extract the relevant factors bearing on consumer attitude towards SMS based advertisements and users actual behavior. A sample of 110 smart phone users from Malappuram District of Kerala state has been taken for the study by using convenient sampling method. Malappuram district consist of 25 lakh smart phone users due to time and cost constraints sample size it"s fixed to 110. The data required for the study were collected by using of the interview schedule method. The questionnaire was prepared in English language, the investigator recorded the responses in the instrument. The instrument consist of five point scale Likert scale statements relating to attitude and perception towards short message service (SMS) advertising through mobile phones. The collected data analyzed by employing factor analysis and independent sample t-test. The result reveal that there are no difference in perception towards privacy in relation to SMS advertisements among male and female. The study also found that privacy and disturbance related perception factors, purchase intention related perception factors and finally content related perception factors are the leading factors contributing to the perception towards SMS advertisements