Blockchain meets marketing: Opportunities,threats, and avenues for future research

Blockchain technology is having an increasingly profound impact on the business landscape. Blockchain—a means for storing information and transactions in secure, decentralized manner—has many potential applications for marketing. However, marketing research and practice are still tentative about the use of blockchain and are yet to fully understand it and embrace it. The goal of this editorial is to advance in this direction and offer a path toward incorporating blockchain technology into our scholarly marketing thinking. We review the basic terminology and principles of the blockchain process, provide a comprehensive overview of the potential impact of blockchain on several core marketing areas and propose research questions that can help advance both research and practice as this technology develops.This editorial is accompanied by five research notes written by leading marketing scholars, which explore applications of blockchain to the following marketing topics: Advertising (Joo et al., 2022), Branding (Colicev, 2022), Creative Industries (Malik et al., 2022), Pricing (Zhang, 2022), and Privacy (Marthews & Tucker, 2022).     

Internal marketing: Concepts,measurement and application

Internal marketing issues have been discussed widely for a number of years yet this remains an area in marketing with many fundamental questions unanswered. Previous research has not satisfactorily addressed a number of crucial issues in its development. The lack of attention to detail has hindered its progress and thus relegated it to the sidelines. As part of a wider study which investigates internal marketing from a transaction cost perspective, this paper sets the scene and explores the different views and applications of internal marketing. It addresses those fundamental questions that have not been thoroughly considered in the past. What are the principles that form the foundations for internal marketing? Does internal marketing belong in all organizations? Is internal marketing merely synonymous with good human resource management or should the organization pursue internal marketing in conjunction with external marketing activities? Then, with the transaction cost framework in mind, this paper considers how internal marketing can be measured and whether it is necessary, merely nice, irrelevant or indeed illegitimate.     

Perceived common myths and unethical practices among Direct Marketing professionals

Two arcas of continuing interest to direct marketing professionals are the perceived myths and unethical practices in the field. Documentation of specific cases and more abstract discussion of these two points of interest frequently appear in the direct marketing literature (e.g. Gitlitz and Barton, 1983; Lewis, 1982; Pierce, 1985). Indeed, the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) has promulgated specific guidelines (DMA, 1985) for ethical business practices within the industry. Up to this point, however, there has been no attempt at a systematic evaluation of the perceptions of professionals in the field. Such an evaluation of these two areas of practice would appear to beg the following questions: (1) What are the major common myths which abound in direct marketing as perceived by professionals who come into direct contact with the operations of direct marketing organizations? (2) Which of these so-called myths are most requently mentioned? (3) What are the most commonly perceived unethical practices? (4) Which of these unethical practices are most frequently mentioned by direct marketing professionals? (5) To what extent do these perceived unethical practices coincide with the industry's own guidelines?     

A note on business replies to consumer letters of praise and complaint

Business firms require feedback from the marketplace to determine whether or not the needs of the firm's customers are being satisfied. When feedback takes the form of consumer letters, it seems obvious that it is simply good marketing practice to respond to letters of complaint and good consumer relations to respond to any letter from a consumer. With the dual objectives of providing introductory marketing students with a meaningful and participatory exercise in consumerism and of exploring an apparently virgin research area, a project was undertaken which generated 250 letters to business firms concerning their products and services. The analysis of the business firms' responses attempted to find out: What types of business firms replied? In what from did these firms reply? And, how did the “customers” react to their replies?     

Can We Stay Ahead of the Obsolescence Curve? On Inflection Points,Proactive Preemption,and the Future of Supply Chain Management

Great companies—like great products and great nations—have always endured a four‐stage life cycle: emergence, growth, maturity, and decline. Faster clockspeeds—enabled by compressed technology cycles and accelerated by new knowledge‐sharing routines such as crowdsourcing—are shrinking life cycles. What does this mean? Entities of all kinds now find themselves in a constant race against obsolescence. We thus ask a vital question,”Can we (as a discipline) stay ahead of the obsolescence curve?” Technological and sociological inflection points promise to change the rules of engagement. For instance, 3D printing, Big Data, and drones promise to change management practice. Budget deficits, poor skill improvement, and MOOCs promise to change academe. We discuss adaptation challenges and proactive preemption as preludes to presenting various visions of the future of supply chain management.     

Net gain: Expanding markets through virtual communities

What are virtual communities? How do they operate? How can they help expand markets, increase visibility, and improve profitability? What effects have they had on business models and marketing strategies? John Hagel discussed these issues in his keynote speech at the Direct Marketing Association's 1998 net.marketing Conference held April 1998.     

Managerial and Public Attitudes Toward Ethics in Marketing Research

This research updates and significantly extends Akaah and Riordon’s (J Market Res 26:112–120, 1989) evaluation of ethical perceptions of marketing research misconduct among marketing research professionals. In addition to examining changes in perceptions toward key marketing research practices over time, we assess professionals’ judgments on the ethicality, importance, and occurrence of a variety of new marketing research ethics situations in both online and offline contexts. In a second study, we assess ethical judgments of the public at large using a representative sample of US consumers—key stakeholders ignored in prior research on unethical marketing research practices. Generally speaking, disapproval of unethical research conduct has grown across the board in the last 20?years for both managers and marketing researchers. The same misconduct elicits a stronger disapproval in the online environment compared to the offline environment. Compared to marketing researchers, managers tend to think that unethical research conduct occurs more frequently. Those who conduct marketing research or use its findings (i.e., marketing researchers and managers) are less tolerant of unethical research conduct than the general public.     

Exporter trust,commitment and marketing control in integrated and independent export channels

This article explores differences between three entry modes—sales subsidiaries, agents and distributors—along four dimensions—trust, commitment, marketing control and performance. It is posited that trust, commitment, marketing control and performance are highest in integrated modes (like sales subsidiaries) and lowest in distributor relationships, the agency solution being situated somewhere in between. These hypotheses are tested in a sample of 260 exporter intermediary relations of 120 Norwegian exporters. Concerning marketing control the hypotheses are confirmed. On the other hand—there is virtually no difference between agents and distributors on two other dimensions: trust and commitment. Here the dividing line goes between integrated and independent channels. Concerning financial performance, there is no significant difference between the three modes of entry. However, integrated modes of entry seem to meet exporter expectations better than independent solutions regarding the more general performance measure, ‘goal achievement’. Implications for research and management are discussed.     

An Ethical and Legal Synthesis of Dumping: Growing Concerns in International Marketing

International law holds that a firm is dumping if its foreign price is either below its domestic price or below its marginal cost. Domestic firms often claim that a low-cost foreign firm is engaged in a long run strategy to destroy the domestic industry and harm domestic consumers. Dumping is a permanent feature of marketing strategies of numerous companies, and anti-dumping complaints are increasingly resorted to as a defensive instrument to stop the challengers. This article offers a synthesis of ethical and legal issues involved and relates them to marketing concerns in international operations. What is the current state of dumping legislation? What concern over personal ethics should a manager have? Using teleological and deontological philosophies of ethics the argument is made that the marketing manager who set very low prices for an international market is not behaving unethically.     

Challenges and opportunities in high-dimensional choice data analyses

Modern businesses routinely capture data on millions of observations across subjects, brand SKUs, time periods, predictor variables, and store locations, thereby generating massive high-dimensional datasets. For example, Netflix has choice data on billions of movies selected, user ratings, and geodemographic characteristics. Similar datasets emerge in retailing with potential use of RFIDs, online auctions (e.g., eBay), social networking sites (e.g., mySpace), product reviews (e.g., ePinion), customer relationship marketing, internet commerce, and mobile marketing. We envision massive databases as four-way VAST matrix arrays of Variables?×?Alternatives?×?Subjects?×?Time where at least one dimension is very large. Predictive choice modeling of such massive databases poses novel computational and modeling issues, and the negligence of academic research to address them will result in a disconnect from the marketing practice and an impoverishment of marketing theory. To address these issues, we discuss and identify the challenges and opportunities for both practicing and academic marketers. Thus, we offer an impetus for advancing research in this nascent area and fostering collaboration across scientific disciplines to improve the practice of marketing in information-rich environment.     

(Un)saving face,or the designer face as a new consumer commodity

The designer face as a new consumer commodity is a focus of this work. By venturing into the global marketplace of elective plastic surgery, the authors aim to develop a concept of the face in the consumer behavior discipline. “What is the face?” – is the fundamental research question. What makes the face the site of voluntary alteration? How do marketing forces drive the mainstream embrace of surgical correction of facial features as a commercial commodity, similar to shoes? This study takes place in South Korea, a nation that places a strong metaphorical value on the face and has historically developed the honor-centered concept of “saving face” as a guiding principle of life. Specifically study examines the normative function of advertising as presented in street billboards. Results show a transition occurring for the face's major functions and highlight emerging newer functions - the face as a mask and the face as fashion.     

The response of the ‘new consumer’ to promotion in the transition economies of the former Soviet Bloc

Before the collapse of communism, promotion in the former Soviet Bloc functioned more as either propaganda or generic information rather than what marketers would call marketing. Today’s “new consumer” in these transition economies, however, is being forced to integrate Western-style promotion with traditional suspicion of marketing, all in systems that have transitioned more in some countries of the region than others. What does this mean for the multinational marketer? What old and new characteristics of the consumers in that region will force marketers to adapt their approach to promotion? Through research propositions this conceptual paper explores major themes of consumer behavior specific to the transitioning economies of the area, proposing, rather than answering, the right questions marketers need to ask about new target markets. For managers, the article offers implications and recommendations derived from these questions.     

Whistleblowing in Organizations: An Examination of Correlates of Whistleblowing Intentions,Actions, and Retaliation

Whistleblowing on organizational wrongdoing is becoming increasingly prevalent. What aspects of the person, the context, and the transgression relate to whistleblowing intentions and to actual whistleblowing on corporate wrongdoing? Which aspects relate to retaliation against whistleblowers? Can we draw conclusions about the whistleblowing process by assessing whistleblowing intentions? Meta-analytic examination of 193 correlations obtained from 26 samples (N = 18,781) reveals differences in the correlates of whistleblowing intentions and actions. Stronger relationships were found between personal, contextual, and wrongdoing characteristics and whistleblowing intent than with actual whistleblowing. Retaliation might best be predicted using contextual variables. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Endogeneity in survey research

Endogeneity is a crucial problem in survey-based empirical research on marketing strategy (MS) and inter-organizational relationships (IORs); if not addressed, it can cause researchers to arrive at flawed conclusions and to offer poor advice to practitioners. Although the field is increasingly cognizant of endogeneity-related issues, many authors fail to properly address it, particularly in survey-based research. Emphasizing the role of essential heterogeneity, this article develops an overarching framework to help improve the understanding of endogeneity problems and how to tackle them when researchers use cross-sectional survey-based data. The authors provide explanations of and advice for how MS and IOR researchers can address six “painful” and sometimes hidden decisions: 1) Do you have an endogeneity problem? 2) What technique/estimator is appropriate? 3) What instrumental variables (IVs) should be chosen? 4) How should IVs be evaluated empirically? 5) How should the results be interpreted and evaluated? and 6) What results should you report? The authors provide a practical flowchart to guide researchers in their efforts to address endogeneity-related concerns.     

Sustainability, Epistemology, Ecocentric Business, and Marketing Strategy: Ideology, Reality, and Vision

This conceptual article examines the relationship between marketing and sustainability through the dual lenses of anthropocentric and ecocentric epistemology. Using the current anthropocentric epistemology and its associated dominant social paradigm, corporate ecological sustainability in commercial practice and business school research and teaching is difficult to achieve. However, adopting an ecocentric epistemology enables the development of an alternative business and marketing approach that places equal importance on nature, the planet, and ecological sustainability as the source of human and other species’ well-being, as well as the source of all products and services. This article examines ecocentric, transformational business, and marketing strategies epistemologically, conceptually and practically and thereby proposes six ecocentric, transformational, strategic marketing universal premises as part of a vision of and solution to current global un-sustainability. Finally, this article outlines several opportunities for management practice and further research.     

Marketing performance assessment and accountability: Process and outcomes

Marketing accountability, and how it may be achieved via performance assessment and metrics, have been central topics in both the marketing literature and practice (Katsikeas et al. 2016). Recent developments in digital channels, the accompanying explosion of data and emergence of marketing automation, the globalization of markets, and the rise of customer experience as a key firm priority have further magnified interest in and the importance of understanding how potential marketing outcomes are and can be achieved (CMO Survey, 2021; Mintz et al., 2021). As a result, gaining clarity on how to design and manage performance assessment systems to deal with these issues has never been more important. This paper argues that further progress in this research domain requires a deep understanding of the marketing performance assessment (MPA) process to provide both a catalyst and foundation for the next generation of research. Although there has been considerable research in the areas of marketing metrics and marketing accountability, much less attention has been paid to the MPA process that links them. Yet, the MPA process is essential to successful marketing management. To address this, we first review past research in this broad domain to answer the “Where have we been?” question that identifies theneed for a new conceptual model. Second, drawing on research findings both within the broad MPA domain and allied areas within and outside of marketing, we develop and detail a new conceptual model of the MPA process and use it to identify what really needs to be known but is currently unclear in this domain (i.e., “Where do we need to go?”). Third, we suggest how these areas of needed inquiry may best be investigated (i.e., “How do we get there?”) by identifying new perspectives, theories, data sources, and analysis approaches that may be productively employed in future research.     

The Future Scope of Netnography and Social Network Analysis in the Field of Marketing

The marketing landscape has evolved to a great extent with the advent of Internet strategy integration, refined Internet marketing metrics, increase in wireless networking, rising consumer ownership of computers, the era of big data and e-commerce, influencer marketing, and the evolution of the Internet. To tap this virtual environment, newer methods of Internet research are required. This article studies the usage of two Internet research methodologies—Netnography and Social Network Analysis—and explores their potential toward the domain of marketing. An exhaustive literature review was conducted and after analyzing the previously published literature in this domain, it is seen that a clear link between these methodologies and the field of marketing has not been established. With a detailed analysis of previously published research work, using these two methodologies the authors are able to derive correlations with marketing concepts and are able to establish the future potential of the two methodologies of Netnography and Social Network Analysis as marketing research methodologies.     

The future of marketing: brightest star in the firmament,or a fading meteor? Some hypotheses and a research agenda

Excellent marketing has always emanated from a deep understanding of consumer needs and expectations, combined with their right to be informed, protected and their right to quality of life. Evidence for this fundamental bedrock of marketing is provided. The problem is that in 2009 "marketing" just doesn't mean "good marketing", or even "honest marketing" and is widely seen as "mismarketing" in practice, largely the result of marketing's demotion to promotion and puffery. Evidence is provided for this view. The paper then makes some suggestions about possible new initiatives/directions for the discipline. These are:

? the name marketing itself

? making the discipline truly professional

? making marketing fully accountable for its expenditure

The accountability issue, however, is, in the author's view, the principal way to rescue the discipline from demise, so the bulk of the paper concerns this issue and sets out an agenda for research.     

Transfer of management knowhow to developing countries: An empirical investigation

This article examines the transfer of management knowhow to developing countries through managers who undertake a graduate program in business at an advanced country. Based upon a study of 67 Turkish managers, all of whom received a master's degree in business in the United States, the article addresses three issues: What are the differences in the local applicability of various management skills (including marketing) which were acquired in an advanced country? What company and individual manager characteristics are associated with the local application of these management skills? What principal factors impede the transfer of management knowhow to an indigeneous organization?     

The role of flexibility in online business

Companies are trying to be more competitive by establishing a presence on the fast-growing Net. At the same time, the Net's business environment is growing more complex and uncertain. Management literature argues that flexibility can enhance corporate responsiveness to such an environment. However, research on e-businesses has focused mainly on the idea of customizing online offerings. Here is a holistic view of flexibility, investigating how online companies can become flexible through the different functional aspects of their business—technology, human resources, operations, marketing, finance, and management. What are the related opportunities and pitfalls? And what guidelines can managers follow?