기업의 스마트폰 메시지에 대한 고객 신뢰도에 관한 연구: 메시지 정교화 모델을 중심으로

Individuals often receive smishing campaigns (mobile phishing messages), which they treat as spam. Thus, firms should understand how their customers distinguish their promotion messages from smishing. However, only a few studies examined this important issue. The present study employs the elaboration likelihood model to develop research hypotheses on the relationship between message cue and message credibility. The message cue in this study is classified as content cue, which is found in the content of promotion messages, and as leakage cue, which is found in peripheral information in the message. Leakage cue includes orthography (inclusion of special characters)and an abbreviated link sent by a faithless sender. We also propose that contextualization has a moderating effect on the relationship between content cue and credibility. We conducted a survey experiment to examine the effect of message cues on message credibility in the context of respondents receiving discount coupons through mobile messages. The result of data analysis based on 166 responses suggests that leakage cue had a negative effect on message credibility. A message with defective content cue has a marginally negative effect on message credibility. In particular, defective content cue in a high-contextual message has a strong negative impact on message credibility. This effect was not observed in low-contextual messages. Moreover, message credibility is significantly low regardless of the degree of contextualization if there is a leakage cue in the message. Our findings suggest that mobile promotion messages should be customized for message receivers and should have no leakage cues.