Discovering magic of mobile technology in business: strategic marketing perspective.

Abstract

Mobile technology penetrated all aspects of social and business existence. Studies around mobile technology mostly address the use and adoption process of mobile marketing or mobile commerce from a consumer perspective rather than from a business perspective. Another concern of majority of studies on the use of mobile technology is a focus on technical nature of mobile devices despite the fact that true magic of technology resides in its mobilisation and usage – the deployment of mobile technology. This paper aims to conceptually define and map mobile technology capabilities. Grounded theory approach was applied to collect and analyze in-depth interviews with 28 small and medium-sized enterprises from the UK, which deploy mobile technology for operational and strategic purposes. Results illustrate that mobile technology capabilities represent a set of five substantive capabilities, 1) leveraging mobile technology resources; (2) transforming capability; (3) learning capability; (4) solving problems capability; and (5) leading capability, - a set of five practices which can be employed to orchestrate successfully mobile technology resources. Through transformation of existing processes and mobile technology resources, mobile technology capabilities not only contribute to operational efficiency and effectiveness but drive strategic change within business by enabling vigilant market learning and adaptive market experimentation.