The rise of SMS marketing: key drivers, acceptance and intention to receive advertising SMS in Pakistan

Mobile advertising is flourishing, due to the impressive usage of cellular phones. Pakistan has crossed 133 million cellular subscribers in July 2016. It has captured the advertising discipline in an innovative way. Therefore, this research aimed to portray a parsimonious structure of different factors (entertainment, informativeness, irritation, permission, self-efficacy, subjective norms and attitude) that influence the consumers' behavioural intention towards advertising SMS in Pakistan through the theoretical lenses of theory of reasoned action and theory of planned behaviour. Convenient sampling technique was employed for data collection by distributing questionnaires. The researchers utilised PLS-SEM approach to examine the hypothesised relationships with a sample of 305 Pakistani mobile users. The results disclosed that proposed research framework has a good explorative power (73.2%) in predicting users' behavioural intention towards SMS advertisement in Pakistan. Furthermore, this study delivers a rich understanding to the marketing strategy makers for developing an effective marketing strategy.