Framework for Personalization of sms advertising of goods and services

Abstract

The exponential growth of wireless as a communication medium offers exciting new advertising opportunities and demand that wireless becomes a new channel of the marketing communications mix. With it, comes the ever-growing niche for short message service (sms) advertising, creating a need for personalization to enable users quickly get goods and services as well as be able to post own advertisements. Personalization entails targeted advertising based on client profiles in a bid to enhance the experience for mobile owners and brands. Even though several personalization strategies exist, they require the presence of a structured and well-maintained database. However, building such a database for sms campaigns requires that clients must divulge information about their habits, interests, and preferences. Even though data can be obtained explicitly from consumers, instead of existing databases, there is a tendency to resist sharing of personal details because of privacy reasons. This creates an inevitable trade-off between personalization and control granted to the consumer, hence the need for an intervention to leverage on ‘anonymous’ personalization of sms advertising. In existing personalization strategies, most efforts seem to be directed toward internet-based advertising in which users make explicit or implicit choices, which are collected into a database. This data then become the basis of the user’s profile, which allows recommendations to be targeted to the user. This faces the privacy challenges as some users are reluctant to give their personal details. Thus, this research proposes a process to design and create a framework for personalizing sms advertising without user registration or subscription. Our proposed framework anticipates that users will only require their cell phone numbers to advertise or search for information, which will be used in personalization. The proposed model envisions creation of a mobile phone based artifact that uses SMS to promote commercial relationships, and establish a virtual open market that provides an opportunity to all mobile phone users.

Keywords: personalization, SMS advertising