DOI: 10.11118/978-80-7509-820-7-0310

MOBILE APPS AS AN IMPORTANT MARKETING COMMUNICATION TOOL IN STARTUP BUSINESS IN THE SLOVAK REPUBLIC

Soňa CHOVANOVÁ SUPEKOVÁ, Hana KRCHOVÁ

The aim of this conference paper is to provide a perspective on the issues in startup entrepreneurship. Start-ups in the European Union represent a driving force for research and development in many areas, and therefore the authors have sought to obtain insightful information on the entrepreneurship of entities that consider themselves start-ups from the beginning of their business activities. Start-up business models are significantly supported by EU funds and in Slovakia by the Slovak Business Agency. Many of these ideas have become successful products and profitable business forms.
The main methods of research on start-up businesses were qualitative and quantitative marketing research methods. A questionnaire survey was sent to a selected sample of small and medium-sized enterprises in Slovakia based on data from the Statistical Office of the Slovak Republic. The return rate of the questionnaire was 638. Enterprises answered questions related to the focus of business activity, the area of start-up entrepreneurship, the innovativeness of enterprises, and the merit questions addressed mobile applications, patents, and trademarks of the surveyed enterprises. The data collected by the questionnaire survey was processed by advanced statistical methods, the method of artificial neural networks (ANN) was used to identify influential variables. Critical analysis is being used to identify specific factors and reasons that influenced the start-up enterprises' decisions to develop mobile applications and their subsequent use in marketing communications.
The paper brings empirical evidence of how locally based companies have been approaching the evaluation of mobile apps and how they incorporate the specific modern forms of marketing communications into their start-up development. The research yielded interesting findings that more than 36% of the companies studied started as start-ups and more than 24% of the entities still consider their activities as start-up activities. 17% of the surveyed enterprises have already developed a mobile app for both Android and IOS and more than 20 plan to develop mobile apps, more than 8% have mobile apps in the development phase.
The findings published in the paper are partial results of the INMARK research task, in which the researchers are looking for innovative approaches to marketing management, not only in the field of marketing communication but across all marketing tools. The creation of mobile applications as new products is analysed in terms of the reasons that preceded its creation. Designing a model of innovative approaches in marketing management can help a number of start-ups in their managerial decision-making and marketing management.

Klíčová slova: start-up, mobile app, marketing, new product development, innovative marketing tools

stránky: 310-317, Publikováno: 2021, online: 2021