Mobile marketing study shows college students are unimpressed

Mobile marketing dislike frustration

Mobile marketing dislike frustrationResearch has shown that these consumers are “irked” with the ads that they have been receiving.

Ball State University has released a report that has shown that consumers attending college are making the switch from regular cell phones to smartphones at a very rapid rate, making them prime mobile marketing targets.

However, this doesn’t mean that the ads that they have been receiving are doing the trick.

Throughout the last three years, the change to smartphones has truly picked up speed. That said, these same students are expressing increasing antipathy for the mobile marketing campaigns to which they have been exposed. This could suggest that marketers need to alter the way that they promote products, services, and offers to this demographic.

The growth in dislike for mobile marketing appears to be growing at a similar rate to smartphone adoption.

Ball State held an annual survey of its own students and determined that smartphone and feature phone use has switched places as of 2009. The results indicated that in that year, there were 27 percent of students using smartphones, but the most recent statistics show that this number has skyrocketed to 73 percent.

According to a Ball State advertising professor, and the director of the university’s Institute for Mobile Media Research, Michael Hanley, “The complete reversal of mobile device usage reflects the explosive growth of Internet-accessible, computer-like smartphones away from text and talk feature phones.” He also went on to say that “For many college students, their lives revolve around their smartphones.”

Hanley explained this statement by saying that “Not only is it a phone, but they use it to email, send text, download and listen to music and access social media sites.” Though this is positive news for smartphone manufacturers, the fact that mobile marketing is not appealing to these device owners, as it is, is not quite as positive.

The survey showed that college students with smartphones are becoming increasingly annoyed with mobile marketing, with 83 percent saying that they are displeased with it. This is a massive increase over last year, when the figure was 68 percent. Almost half of the respondents said that they were less likely to make a purchase from a company that had sent them an ad.

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