The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the phenomenon of young consumers’ motives. A descriptive research approach was applied on a convenience sample of 243 (97.2 % response rate) young consumers aged 18-35 years to measure their acceptance of SMS advertising, intention to receive SMS advertisement and responses to SMS advertisements. Findings revealed that young consumer’s uses and gratification are significantly and positively related to their attitudes. Moreover, young consumer’s attitude towards SMS advertising is significantly and positively related to their behavioural intentions in Botswana. The collected sample is only limited to young consumers from University of Botswana and Botho university students’ context. As such, very limited generalization can be derived to the entire youth consumers in Botswana. Future researchers can look into older working consumers or cross cultural consumer segments. The research will assist managers to determine factors that predominantly influence young consumers’ attitudes, their motives and behavioural intentions toward SMS advertising in Botswana. In that way, managers are in a better position to unravel and understand consumers intended behaviour regarding SMS advertising. In addition, the study will also assist managers, policy makers, marketers and advertisers in crafting relevant and targeted messages to reach young consumers and millennial that constitutes a major proportion of the Botswana’s population. This is the first main empirical research on motives for using SMS and SMS advertising tool from Botswana and African context. Majority of previous studies have mainly focused on European, American or Asian context. Limited research has been done in Africa to investigate the hypothesized relationships between motives for using SMS, attitudes towards SMS and behavioural intentions of consumers. attitude towards mobile advertising and its effects on their behavioural intentions.

Keywords: Motives, Consumer attitudes, SMS usage strategy, Behavioural intentions Paper type: Research Paper