A Study on Determining the Factors Which Affect Consumers’ Permission for Marketing Messages Sent by Companies
Selma Kalyoncuoglu, Emel Faiz

Abstract
Developments which have been achieved in information and communications technologies thanks to globalization have enabled companies to reach consumers in a faster, more effective and cheaper way. Especially rapidly developing such technologies have provided the opportunity for companies to be able to send commercial messages for promotion purposes which have data, audio and visual content via SMS, MMS and E-mail easily within the day. However, the fact that companies can reach consumers 24 hours via these channels and send messages constantly has led to harassment of consumers by companies. Practices which bore consumers who are bombarded with advertisements throughout the day have turned into a mechanism which is defined as permission marketing in the literature and which requires companies to get approval of consumers for the advertisement and promotional messages that they will send. With this regard, this study aims to determine the factors which will be effective in consumers’ permission for marketing messages to be sent by companies. Within the scope of this study, final valid data were gathered from 430 participants through an online questionnaire via internet. Stepwise regression analysis was applied to the collected data in order to determine whether factors which are believed to influence consumers’ permission for advertisement messages from companies are effective or not. It was found out that while factors of personal experience, perceived behavioural control and perceived usefulness have significantly positive effect on permission; factors of influence of customer’s social network, institutional regulations and not irritation did not yield any significant effects on permission. This result indicates that if consumers’ personal experiences with companies are positive, if they can control the number and type of the messages they will receive, if they have the flexibility to continue/terminate their permissions, and if they think that they will gain advantage from messages, consumers are willing to give their permission and personal information to companies in order for them to send marketing messages.

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