Marketing communication: principles and practice

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BOX 9.5
M-COMMERCE
Mobile telephone handsets launched in November 1999 have a mini Web browser
(WAP) that can send e-mail, receive news and information, send orders for products,
transact banking services, and download music. By 2004, around 95 per cent of mobile
phones are likely to be WAP enabled. With around 50 per cent of UK adults owning 
a mobile phone by the end of 1999, this is going to be a major alternative trading
channel.
(
Source
: 
Retail Week
, 18 February 2000)

---

through traditional, non-interactive formats. A formal test was made of thirty-
one advertisements in terms of product appeal, appetite appeal (the test
featured food and drink products), novelty, and verbal appearance of 
the advertisement. Some ninety-six people participated in the test. The
researchers found that for certain products and certain consumers, interactive
advertising interrupts the process of persuasion. Effectiveness is usually
gauged in terms of engagement and persuasiveness. If persuasion is a process
of presentation and attention, through comprehension, through generation
and retrieval of related cognitions, to yielding and retention, then it is the link
between retrieval and yielding that is broken by interactive systems. In the
test purchase, intention and time spent viewing the advertisement were both
lower for the interactive advertisements than for the traditional advertise-
ments. Participants with a visual bias in their information processing were
inhibited by the interactive system. Thus, the performance of interactive
advertising seems to depend upon whether the consumer prefers information
in a visual or verbal manner, and whether the advertising content is primarily
visual or verbal in impression. 
Box 9.6 focuses on a recent strategy in the music business that fuses the
communication act and exchange.