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).     

The evolution of social media and its impact on organizations and leaders

This paper examines organizational impacts of social media on Fortune 100 companies over a 5-year period (2011–2016). Specifically, the study focuses on three broad areas of social media impact: (1) the adoption of social media platforms across industries and business models from 2011 to 2016, (2) the influence of social media adoption on the roles of the chief information officer (CIO) and chief marketing officer (CMO) and their changing relationships in companies over this time frame, and (3) the impact of social media on company strategy, governance, and the IT (information technology) and marketing functions. The results support the contention that the CMO role has evolved to meet the technology needs of the marketing function and that the relationship between the CMO and CIO has taken on greater importance. In most Fortune 100 companies in 2016, social media has transitioned to ownership by the marketing department and the CMO provides leadership for social media strategy while working closely with the CIO. This study contributes to a better understanding of the established role of social media in companies, governance structures, and the evolving roles of both the CIO and CMO in relation to social media trends. The study integrates the IT and marketing literature to provide an agenda for future work that builds on theory and establishes an ongoing cohesive research agenda.     

Customer-Based Valuation

Customer lifetime value (CLV) has emerged as an important metric to manage and grow customers. Marketing scholars have written many books and articles on this topic. However, most of this research has focused on tactical marketing decisions. While this is important, it is not enough to gain attention of senior managers who are concerned about firm level metrics such as stock price. To have greater impact marketing needs to go beyond brand-level profits to show the impact of marketing actions on firm profitability. In this paper we focus on customer lifetime value and its link to firm value. We discuss research that provides customer-based valuation of firms and suggest directions for future research.     

Distribution of Marketing Research Material to Universities: The Case of Archive of Market and Social Research (AMSR)

ABSTRACT

The aim of this note is to understand how content relating to marketing and market research is distributed to and within universities. The focus of the study includes the behavior of all those in this market for information, namely suppliers (whether content generators, aggregators, packagers, or distributors of content) of marketing research, university staff, and students. The case study method was implemented to collect data. The case study focuses on UK Higher Education. Specifically, the authors use the case study of the newly developed Archive of Market and Social Research (AMSR) to explore how content relating to marketing and market research is distributed to and within universities. The research involved personal interviews with 15 librarian senior managers selected from 14 universities.

The interviews with librarians provided insight into how AMSR could be distributed to university libraries and how it could be accessed. The findings highlight the role of university academics in specifying the content of marketing and market research. They focus on ‘real world’ management problems to deliver research with impact and relevant teaching. Therefore, they need company and industry information and are more likely to use current sources. The study maps the process of acquisition of marketing and market research content by universities and identifies the different roles involved in this process. The study is in line with the emerging literature that focuses on the role of education in explaining the relevance gap in marketing research. The study contrasts between the situation in the university market and industrial buying and adds to our understanding of the complexities associated with the distribution of the marketing research material. The result is expected to be a much sharper focus for the marketing of the archive material, leading to greater use of recent high-quality market research by marketing educators, and changes to marketing and market research syllabuses.

This note provides insight into how suppliers (whether content generators, aggregators, packagers, or distributors of content) of market and marketing research should market to universities and ensure the use of their information resources by students and teachers and how they should. The findings of the study contribute to understanding customer needs and shaping a new service product proposition. In addition, the study provides insight into how university students and staff access and should access commercial research on marketing from the market research industry (in particular from the Archive of Market and Social Research) and use it in their learning, so that their knowledge will be more up to date and their employability will be increased. Adding several insights to the issue of distribution of marketing research material to universities. The paper relates to the marketing of information resources to universities, specifically to the work of the Archive of Market and Social Research, in marketing their information assets to universities, and more specifically the relationship between the “push” of suppliers, libraries, journal and textbook suppliers and information aggregators (such as EBSCO and JISC) and the pull coming from academic researchers and lecturers, who might use this information in their teaching and research. The present study can be seen as a classic case study of understanding buyer behavior, but in a modern world of information platforms, aggregation, and the digital economy.     

Changing Times

The study focused on the impact of marketing information (direct information) on consumer buying behavior in a matured marketing environment. The respondents responded to queries related to the influence of marketing information (product, price, promotion, place, etc.) on their purchase of passenger cars. Simple linear regression and multiple liner regression methods have been used to test the consistency and impact and the results suggest that (a) all marketing information has an impact on consumer buying behavior and (b) Product and Place/Distribution information have high impact and price and promotion information have low influence over consumer purchase.     

Oral history and information technology: Human voices of assessment

Dramatic advances in technology for acquiring, managing, and sharing information promise to reshape the workplace by eliciting new behaviors and introducing new organizational patterns. For academic medical centers, the integration of information technology into programs of education, research, and patient care is essential for increased organizational effectiveness.

At Baylor College of Medicine, we have developed information‐sharing and management tools, collectively called the Virtual Notebook System (VNS). The VNS is a multiuser, workstation‐based hypermedia system that serves as a technologically extended analog of the laboratory notebook used in biomedical research. We are deploying the VNS in scientific groups at Baylor, and are applying oral history techniques to assess its impact.

This article shows how oral history captures the “human voices”; of Baylor's experience and helps us understand the effects of information technology on the processes of biomedical research.     

Technology Synergy,Product Characteristics,and New Product Performance: A Meta‐Analytic Review

The associations of technology synergy, product characteristics, and new product performance are widely spread in the marketing and innovation management literatures. However, little research integrates these associations. This study adopts a meta‐analytic approach to aggregate prior findings across studies published before 2010 to review the relationships between technology synergy, product characteristics, and new product performance. Structural equation analysis reveals that technology synergy has: (a) a positive medium effect on new product performance; (b) a positive and strong impact on product advantage, which then affects new product performance; and (c) an indirect effect on new product performance through product innovativeness and product advantage. These findings suggest that product innovation and advantage are important intermediaries between technology synergy and new product performance—as yet unrevealed in extant literature. Copyright © 2012 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

全球化营销的风险与防范

全球化营销是将全球看成一个统一的大市场,在对其进行市场调研的基础上,进行市场细分并选择自己的目标市场,实施营销策略组合。它强调企业应在全球范围内寻求竞争优势和最佳市场。全球化的趋势得益于正在降低的各国贸易壁垒和交通、信息技术的迅猛发展。全球化营销的巨大经济效益和市场前景对企业有很强的吸引力,但也不可避免地存在风险,因此,如何防范这些风险则是全球化营销要着重解决的课题。     

Making Sense of Marketing Data: Some MIS Perspectives on the Analysis of Large Data Sets

Despite the growth in the size and complexity of corporate data, the technology for analyzing it has not kept up with the advances in data collection, in that managers mostly need to rely on marketing research and information systems experts to generate the analysis and reports they need. We review some useful approaches here from the computer science and information systems fields for the analysis of large data sets, viz. good data organization and the use of flexible analysis tools, for making the analysis more tractable and user-friendly. These methods are increasingly being adopted by practitioners who are hard-pressed to generate business intelligence from large corporate databases. However, the benefits of these approaches may not be confined only to practitioners, and may apply to academic researchers working with large data sets, as well.     

Marketing Strategy in an Internet-Enabled Environment: A Retrospective on the First Ten Years of JIM and a Prospective on the Next Ten Years

During the past decade, developments such as the rapid growth of the Internet, digitization of information products, and digitization of the information attributes of non-information products, has necessitated businesses to fundamentally rethink, as well as institute major changes in, their marketing strategies. Against this backdrop, we present a critical assessment of extant research on marketing strategy in an Internet-enabled environment viewed through the lens of research published in previous volumes of the Journal of Interactive Marketing (JIM), and speculate on the future of interactive marketing in the contexts of marketing practice, research in marketing and marketing education. Looking back, it is evident that marketing strategy and marketing operations have been transformed by the Internet in many ways. Looking ahead, it can be expected that marketing strategy and marketing operations will be even more extensively integrated and blended in the Internet-enabled market environment in the future.     

Identification of Marketing Needs and Means of Communication of Romanian Marketing Companies in the Context of the Knowledge Society

A few decades ago, academics and economic pundits used to say that information is the main source of power. However, in the Knowledge Society, as we experience it today, information is readily available for everyone, and the real challenge is to master modern and complex information analysis tools, which can make sense of the information overflow of modern society, thus constituting the true competitive advantages of major economic players. For a competent analyst, data generated by a survey, for instance, can reveal paramount information about consumer behavior, competitive strategies, or any other economic and social environment-related aspect deemed important. The marketing needs of Romanian marketing companies are very diversified, commencing with the research of the needs and demand on the target market, going down to the 4Ps (Product, Price, Promotion, and Placement) and their components. The present marketing research was performed using seven categories of information sources: specialized publications in marketing; specialized publications in economics; information provided by specialized institutions in consultancy and marketing research; information provided by individual marketing specialists; information provided by advertising agencies; information provided by the economic sections of the daily newspapers; and job Websites.     

It pays to pay attention: How firm's and competitor's marketing levers affect investor attention and firm value

Investors' attention to a firm's stock has been demonstrated to influence stock returns (Da et al., 2011). But does a firm's marketing information draw attention to a firm's stock? Research in finance, accounting, and marketing has investigated advertising as one potential driver of investors' attention to a firm's stock. How about other potential marketing drivers? The authors develop hypotheses related to the impact of the changes in four marketing levers: advertising, product development announcements, WOM, and customer satisfaction on the change in investor attention to a firm's stock. Furthermore, they investigate the moderating role of competitors' marketing levers in these relationships.To test the hypotheses, they compile a panel dataset with 349 firms covering the 2007–2017 period. The results suggest that the changes in the focal firm's advertising and WOM have a positive and significant impact on the changes in investor attention to the focal firm’s stock. Furthermore, these effects are amplified when there is an increase in competitors' advertising spending and WOM, respectively. For the customer satisfaction lever, the results suggest that the change in competitors' customer satisfaction enhances the impact of the change in focal firm's customer satisfaction on investor attention. Collectively, the results suggest that investors attend to the firm's and its competitors' marketing information in a much more nuanced manner than previously thought.     

Eat,drink, and create content: a multi-method exploration of visual social media marketing content

As visual social media marketing (VSMM) content continues to increase in popularity, it is imperative for marketers to understand the elements of such marketing efforts that capture consumers attention. Across three empirical studies, the researchers use eye tracking technology and a scenario-based experimental design to explore the impacts of the use of figurative language (i.e., antithesis and alliteration) and Snapchat’s drawing feature on consumers attention to the verbal element (i.e., caption) of company-generated and consumer-generated VSMM content (i.e., snap), specifically, on Snapchat. Results demonstrate the positive impact of the use of figurative language on consumers attention to the caption in VSMM content. Furthermore, consumers attention to the caption in company-generated (consumer-generated) VSMM content is greater when the caption uses antithesis (alliteration). Finally, the presence of pictorial information (i.e., drawings) in VSMM content may impact the relationship between the use of figurative language (i.e., alliteration) and consumers attention to the caption in consumer-generated VSMM content. Implications for marketing and advertising theory and practice are discussed.     

Measuring the Effects of Marketing Changes in Transit Systems Using Multiple Time Series Modeling

Measuring the impact of marketing changes presents problems for transit management. Little has been done on employing appropriate research designs that can isolate the effects of a marketing change. In this study, the goal of the policy change was to improve both the efficiency and effectiveness of changes. The impact of the policy change on these measures was assessed through multivariate time series modeling.     

The future of marketing

The main thesis of this article is that several long-term trends are reshaping marketing and forcing marketing managers to change radically to keep up. These long-term trends are technological, socioeconomic and geopolitical. Advances in technology, in particular, are having a profound impact on marketing, resulting in the deepening of customer relationships and the continuous expansion of the service economy. Artificial intelligence, big data, the Internet, and the expansion of networks are creating a revolution in marketing that makes the 1960s-style 4 Ps increasingly obsolete. Compounding the problem for marketers are the socioeconomic factors of diversity and inclusion, as well as major geopolitical threats. I explore the nature of change, extrapolate marketing practice into the future, and examine the implications for marketing managers, marketing education and academic research in marketing.     

International entrepreneurial marketing strategies of MNCs: Bricolage as practiced by marketing managers

The extant research lacks information on entrepreneurial marketing in large international firms. This study explores the international entrepreneurial marketing strategies of multinational corporations (MNCs), and its results reveal that MNC marketing managers use bricolage to develop international entrepreneurial marketing. A novel finding of the study is that the international entrepreneurial marketing strategies of MNCs include co-innovation, accelerating customer value, and international expansion based on regional market leadership. Marketing managers use both parallel and selective bricolage in their international entrepreneurial marketing. Environmental uncertainty and entrepreneurship culture are important drivers of the implementation of bricolage to develop international entrepreneurial marketing. The research findings can inform MNC management of the options available to utilize corporate venturing to facilitate bricolage and in turn to realize international entrepreneurial marketing strategies.     

Exploring the impact of mobile money services on marketing interactions in relation to consumer well-being in subsistence marketplaces – lessons from rural Cambodia

Abstract

The mobile phone has increasingly become a channel for providing access to formal financial services. There is a need to understand how financial service offerings, increasingly accessed through mobile phones, impact marketing interactions, specifically marketing exchange activities and social network relationships, to enhance consumer well-being (CWB) in subsistence marketplaces. Through interviews and contextualised observational research in rural Cambodia, findings reveal that the impacts of mobile money services on marketing interactions in relation to CWB can be categorised at two distinct levels. The first-level impact is the actual physical money transfer transactions as part of the marketing exchange activities which leads to the second-level impact on the social network relationships at interpersonal, social group and cultural levels. Drawing from these insights, policy-makers and industry stakeholders can formulate strategies and develop innovative service offerings through mobile phone technology to enhance CWB in subsistence marketplaces.     

新经济 新营销 新观念--论新经济时代企业经营管理思想的五大变化

本文从信息网络技术对需求、资源、竞争、利润及管理等五个方面,深入分析了信息网络技术对企业经营活动基本要素的影响,阐明了新经济时代市场经营环境和企业经营要素的变化所导致的企业经营思想的五大变化,即在需求方面趋向以个性化的价值认知为导向;在资源方面趋向以全方位的资源整合为手段;在竞争方面趋向以核心竞争力的不断创新为动力:在利润方面趋向以多元化的价值增殖为源泉:在管理方面趋向以跨部门的流程管理为特征。这些变化体现了生产关系对生产力的适应,要求企业在经营实践中必须建立完善的信息系统,加强研发能力,经常梳理其业务组合,建立同顾客及合作者最为便捷的沟通方式,并进行组织系统的重构,建立起以信息管理为基础的管理体系。