Antecedents of Attitude of Mobile Phone Users towards Short Messaging Service (SMS) Advertising in Eswatini

Alex Sipho Lushaba – MTN, Eswatini
Julius Warren Kule – University of Eswatini
Email: alexlushaba@mtn.com/kulewarren@gmail.com

Abstract: This study determined the effect of antecedents of attitudes of mobile phone uses towards short messaging service advertising in Eswatini. Two hypotheses: the informativeness of SMS significantly influence attitudes towards SMS advertising, and the entertainment nature of SMS’ significantly influences attitudes toward SMS advertising were tested. A cross-sectional design for the study was selected. The use of cross-sectional design is supported by Levin (2006), Wang and Cheng (2020), Zangirolami-Raimundo, Echeimberg, and Leone (2018) who advance that cross-sectional research design collects data at one point in time and enhances the establishment of preliminary evidence for future studies. The study adopted a non-probability sampling technique, targeting 500 Facebook users. To collect data, a research instrument(questionnaire) was administered using a digital survey, whereby a digital link was sent to Facebook users. To test for reliability, the study constructed a reliability analysis test to ascertain the presence of internal consistency. Informativeness, and entertainment reliability coefficients were found to be higher than 0.7 which indicates the existence of high internal consistency, and the overall reliability coefficient indicates an acceptable (0.834) internal consistency across all the variables when combined. The Analysis of variation was used to ascertain whether informativeness and entertainment were significant predictors of attitudes towards SMS advertising. The results from the ANOVA output revealed that informativeness and entertainment have a significant influence on mobile phone users’ attitudes towards SMS advertising (F(2, 154)=12.602, p=.000). The study concludes that SMS advertising is a credible route to convey entertainment news via mobile phone devices. In essence, mobile phone consumers’ attitudes towards SMS advertising are mainly dependent on entertainment nature of SMS adverts contained in a message, which further implies that mobile phone consumers are enticed by entertainment mature of SMS advertisements.