Purpose of the study is to explore the effect of the types of mobile coupons(textvs. image-focused coupons; free-gift vs. discount coupons) on characteristic perception of mobile coupons, and the causal relationships among characteristic perception, attitude, and use intention of mobile coupons. A total of 140 university students participated in experiments with questionnaires including one of the four stimuli. Important findings are as follows. First, image-focused mobile coupons generated more enjoyment than did text-focused coupons. However, the text/image-focused coupons were not different in perception of informativeness and credibility of mobile coupons. Second, enjoyment perception was significantly increased when image-focused contents were combined with discount coupons whereas enjoyment perception was decreased when text-focused contents were combined with free-gift coupons. This interaction effect reflects that the level of enjoyment of consumers can be changed in terms of the combination of the value-provision types of coupons and the text-image focused contents. Third, it was found that consumer perception of coupon characteristics formed attitudes toward mobile coupons, and use intention of mobile coupons was determined by attitudes toward mobile coupons. Study findings may fill the void of research investigating the effect of text-image contents and the types of coupons on consumer reponses toward mobile coupons. Mobile coupons have limited quantity of information within a small size of mobile phone screen, therefore, the results were not consistent with prior research tested with mobile advertisements indicating the effect of text-image contents on perception of informativeness and credibility.

With the increasing prevalence of smartphones, marketers have a keen interest in the mobile channel hoping to enhance the effectiveness of marketing activities and improve sales performance. Prior research on mobile marketing examines for example, coupon redemption, time sensitivity, and message optimization, and find that marketing activities and the corresponding performance should be understood based on contexts in which such actions are employed. Following this stream of research, we focus on the context in which consumers interact with mobile phones, and evaluate the role of real-time mobile coupons in driving e-commerce interest. To this end, we collaborate with an online retailer selling beauty products as well as a credit card company distributing mobile coupons on behalf of the online retailer. Target customers are selected using prior usage of credit cards such as category preference and spending amount. When SMS texts are being sent to smartphones with transaction confirmation, mobile coupons are attached to such texts in order to induce target consumers to sign up for the online retailer. Thus our data comes from two sources. The credit card company provides transaction information along with demographics and the online retailer track consumers’ behavior in log and purchase data. Our empirical analyses suggest that real-time contexts matter in determining the effectiveness of mobile coupons. To be specific, consumers who have just spent a small amount of money show a greater propensity to redeem the coupons despite small rewards. Also, heavy users of e-commerce tend to be more responsive to the coupons promoting the online retailer whereas those with large spending on beauty products are less likely to sign up. We discuss theoretical contributions of these findings and offer practical insights.