The Rise of Mobile Marketing: A Decade of Research in Review

Paralleling the growing space mobile phones take in today's consumers' daily routines, academic mobile marketing research has been growing at an increasing pace recently. The presence of multiple players in the mobile eco-system and the wide range of topics under investigation, coupled with the fragmented nature of the mobile marketing domain, call for an updated unifying framework. Accordingly, this review looks at the last decade of mobile marketing research and provides an overview by offering an integrated framework and an extensive review of the research in this domain. Based on a database of 178 articles published in top marketing journals over the last decade, we formulate a framework that is based on (1) the transformation of consumer behavior considering the shifts in users' lifestyles, (2) the effects of mobile on the transformation of existing and the emergence of new businesses, and (3) the integration of mobile within the existing channel mix and its interaction with other channels. In this framework, we first classify each article under various research themes, type of data collection, and their dependent and independent variables. We then synthesize the extant literature in each of the sub-research topics under our framework: the mobile transformations of consumers and businesses, mobile applications, mobile channel deployment and integration, mobile advertising and promotions, promotions, how mobile facilitates consumer-to-business connections, and mobile data. This review provides insights on the recent evolution of the mobile marketing field as well as presenting avenues for future research.