Customers' constant use of smartphones in the shopping journey has opened up new gateways for mobile marketing. Companies can now collect and use pertinent data to provide their customers with context-specific mobile marketing notifications. While such mobile marketing notifications can ease customers' lives and nudge them to make a purchase, they also reveal the abundance of alternative experiences happening "around" the customer at the very moment. By making transparent the opportunities that customers cannot all seize, companies can cause customers to experience the fear of missing out (FOMO). FOMO refers to a person's elusive feeling of missing out on desirable alternative experiences. Our research investigates whether mobile marketing notifications can induce customers' FOMO and, if so, how customers' FOMO affects the customers' evaluation of the current experience in terms of their willingness to spend, satisfaction with the current experience, and intentions to repeat the current experience. Based on a feelings-as-infor-mation theoretical design, the basic tenet of our research is that customers' FOMO potentially reduces the effectiveness of mobile marketing notifications.
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