Utopia or Dystopia?
Introduction
The Future of Technology in Marketing, Special issue of Journal of Marketing Management; Deadline 30 Sep 2019
JOURNAL OF MARKETING MANAGEMENT SPECIAL ISSUE CALL FOR PAPERS
The Future of Technology in Marketing: Utopia or Dystopia?
Special Issue Guest Editors:
- Kristof Coussement, IESEG School of Management, France.
- Paul Harrigan, UWA Business School, The University of Western Australia, Australia.
- Caroline Lancelot Miltgen, AUDENCIA Business School, France.
- Chatura Ranaweera, Lazaridis School of Business, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada.
Deadline for submissions: 30 April 2019
Technology has always been a tool that marketers have turned to. What has changed recently is that the pace of change in technology, and its pervasiveness in society has exploded. The main technologies affecting marketers, consumers and society today are social media, big data analytics, location-tracking, augmented and virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. We are interested in the benefits these technologies bring across the board; whether that be for marketers, employees, consumers, society or all three. We are also equally interested in the challenges these technologies bring across the board, and we believe that these often get overlooked in marketing research. Technology brings with it real challenges, much more than around its implementation to get the best marketing results. It brings with it challenges around consumer privacy, individual wellbeing, and societal equality, among others (Gannon & Prothero, 2018; Krafft et al., 2017; Lancelot Miltgen et al., 2016; Lichy et al., 2017).
The Journal of Marketing Management is calling for submissions to a special issue exploring the future of technology in marketing. Is this a utopian or dystopian future, considering marketers, consumers, and society? Or do you sit on the fence and see both possibilities? This call is running in parallel with the annual Australian and New Zealand Marketing Academy (ANZMAC) conference in Adelaide in December 2018 (), specifically the Digital and Social Media Marketing track. Participation in the conference is not a prerequisite for submission to JMM, and this is an open call for submissions.
The most recent research in the Journal of Marketing Management and beyond has touched upon the issues we want to cover in this special issue. Harrigan et al. (2017) have measured how consumers engage with brands in social media. From a different perspective, Coussement et al. (2017) developed a means to identify member participation in online communities. Delving into the role of content and connections online, Colicev et al. (2018) looked at the different roles of owned and earned media on consumer behaviour, Park et al. (2018) explored the impact of social connections on users’ product purchases in an online community, and Hofacker et al. (2016) investigated gamification and mobile marketing effectiveness. Some of the challenges around technology in marketing have also been explored. Lancelot Miltgen et al. (2016) have shown how privacy concerns can affect consumers’ intention to accept IT innovation. Krafft et al. (2017) have explored permission marketing and consumers’ related privacy concerns, and Casado-Aranda et al. (2018) looked into how consumers process both risky and secure e-payments. Beyond the marketer-consumer dyad, Konsgen et al. (2018) distilled the issues around misinformation on employee online review sites, and Gannon and Prothero (2018) have explored the norms in a community of beauty bloggers on YouTube. These few examples serve to underline the dominance of technology in marketing, and the need for a special issue to collate the key issues and lay a foundation for future marketing research.
Below is an indicative (but not exclusive or exhaustive) list of research domains and technologies of interest. We are open to a broad range of submissions, drawing on theories from within and outside of marketing, and utilising whatever methods best answer the research questions you set. Given the nature of the topic, we welcome submissions from the services marketing domain. We also emphasise that the research need not focus solely on the commercial benefits or challenges of technology for marketers, but we encourage submissions that consider impacts on consumers as individuals, or societies as a whole.
Research domains of interest
- Social media & influencer marketing
- User-generated content
- Big data
- Data science & machine learning for marketing
- Consumer/individual privacy
- Psychological & relational wellbeing
- Consumer/individual exploitation
- Fake news
- Social inequality
- Online bullying/trolling
- Employee/ customer efficiency and effectiveness
- Employee/ customer engagement
Technologies of interest
- Conversational interfaces (for e.g., chat/voice-based interfaces)
- Facial recognition; Natural language and intent recognition
- Sentiment detection
- Augmented reality
- Real-time answer suggestions
- Request/claim content analysis based on context
- Image recognition
- Lead scoring
- Account and opportunities insights
- Forecasting
- Engagement scoring/predictions
- Audiences’ micro segmentation
- Predictive & prescriptive analytics
- Personalized and contextual recommendation systems (offers, products, services, rewards)
- Social media listening software: Location-based analytics
- Service automation and robots
Authors should submit manuscripts of between 8,000–12,000 words (excluding references). All submissions must strictly follow the guidelines for JMM, & Manuscripts should be submitted online using the JMM ScholarOne Manuscripts site. For the full Call for Papers including References, and detailed information on how to submit your manuscript, please visit:
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