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AI’s Transformational Impact on Marketing

Introduction

Special issue of the International Journal of Research in Marketing; Deadline 31 Mar 2024

INTEREST CATEGORY: INNOVATION AND TECH
POSTING TYPE: Calls: Journals

Author: Cecilia Nalagon

IJRM Call for Papers

泭Special Issue on:

AIs Transformational Impact on Marketing

Editors:

  • Renana Peres (The Hebrew University Business School), Martin Schreier (WU Vienna),
  • David Schweidel (Emory University), and
  • Alina Sorescu (Texas A&M)

Guest Area Editors:

  • Yakov Bart (Northeastern University), Prasad A. Naik (UC Davis),
  • Koen Pauwels (Northeastern University), and
  • Kay Peters (University of Hamburg, UC Davis)

Submission Deadline:泭March 31, 2024.

The Marketing Dynamics Conference and IJRM are pleased to announce a Special Issue on AIs Transformational Impact on Marketing. The core of AI is learning, and learning is a dynamic process. With the rapid advancements in Generative AI (e.g., ChatGPT 4, LLaMa) or human interfacing (e.g., visual prompting), we are at a pivotal stage of business and marketing transformation. Such advancements were anticipated to occur in the next 20 to 30 years, but they are now a reality. Artificial intelligence is advancing at an unprecedented pace, pushing the frontiers of our field further than ever before. Our invitation to a special track at this years 20th anniversary Marketing Dynamics Conference (MDC) in Boston (Sep 27-29, 2023) and a subsequent special issue seeks to explore the potential impact of AI advancements on various dimensions of marketing.

The special track represents MDCs tradition for a timely and highly interactive discussion of new research ideas, preliminary findings, and ongoing research. We invite all interested researchers to submit their meaningful proposals to MDCs special track for constructive feedback. Researchers can then implement the initial feedback before submission to the special issue. The special issue seeks to publish innovative and preferably empirical dynamic papers that address transformational issues related, but not limited, to:

  • AIs impact on societal, environmental, governance, regulatory, legal issues in marketing
  • AIs impact on privacy issues
  • AIs impact as a gatekeeper, i.e., as a consumers or firms agent
  • AIs impact on trust
  • AIs impact on theory, marketing research, constructs, and conceptual developments
  • AIs impact on strategic marketing strategy/positioning
  • AIs impact on power balance along the value chain
  • AIs technological implementation challenges along the value chain and within marketing functions/across marketing activities, e.g., marketings organizational transformation (e.g., organizational structure, processes, power structure) and its learning about/from AI with respect to dynamic analytics/modeling conceptualization, decision making, implementation
  • AIs replacement of human activities in marketing
  • AIs impact on competitive market structure
  • AIs impact on consumer perceptions, preferences, choice sets and decision making, eventually to agents that make decisions on behalf of the principal
  • AIs impact in CRM, within life cycle stages and across the customer life cycle
  • AIs impact on (dynamic) and personalized pricing
  • AIs impact on improved distribution
  • AIs impact on retailer activities
  • AIs impact on branding
  • AIs impact on advertising activities, from dynamic content creation to content dissemination across media (e.g., share of voice with sheer number of automatically created posts)
  • AIs impact on search engines (content creation, search algorithms, business model)
  • AIs impact on social media, from content creation to consumption, on influencers and social ads
  • AIs impact on product development and innovation
  • AIs impact on services
  • AIs impact commercial evaluation of marketing activities
  • AIs differential impact on marketing across industries, e.g., to movies, in the B2B arena
  • AI techniques to advance causal inference and identification on datasets encompassing dynamic marketing processes
  • AIs capacity to model dynamic learning/improvements in various marketing applications (e.g., diminishing or increasing returns to annotated data expansions)
  • AIs impact on the marketing contribution to the financial bottom line

Continuing developments in AI, like visual prompting or language models increasing ability to coding, will potentially transform all classical Marketing domains: consumer behavior, pricing, promotions, advertising, distribution, product policy, services, innovation, and competition. It may also impact the way we conceptualize marketing research questions, model, analyze, and interpret marketing data. The marketing AI landscape itself may emerge into new business ecosystems of various layers, from data via algorithms to interfaces. Hence, in exploring interesting topics for this special issue, it may help to approach the characterization of AI from four different perspectives: The content perspective, the senses perspective, technical categorization, and structure of applications. Below, we take the topic of branding, and suggest how AI impact on branding can be studied using the four perspectives:

  1. The content perspective:
    The content perspective relates to the domain of the AI application, e.g., Ethical AI, Sustainable AI, AI Personalization. E.g., if AI apps start creating massive branding content and disseminating it, how does that affect the consistency of consumers branding perceptions?
  2. The senses perspective:
    The senses perspective relates to the human senses used as an interface, e.g., Voice-driven AI, Language-driven AI, Visual AI (pictures and movies). E.g., if language models create brand-related text, voice, pictures, or movies, how does that resonate with consumers? How could consumer perception consistency of a brand be ensured across various content types managed by humans/agencies today? If consumers use language models to (massively) create branded posts, how does affect brand perceptions and branding outcomes?
  3. The technical categorization:
    The technical categorization relates to the kind and quality of data or algorithms used, e.g., Generative AI, Federated Learning, Reinforcement Learning. E.g., would different types of AI algorithms perform differently in learning from branding data for branding content generation across content types? How are dynamic outcomes of different AI algorithms affected by feedback loops generated from disseminating branding content to social media that refeeds into the training set? How strong would biases and/or overfitting occur and what could be done in propagation/penalization to mitigate such effects?
  4. The structure of AI applications:
    The core structural elements of AI: the (training) corpus, the algorithm (i.e., reward and penalization/PPO, SFT), the user interface (see human I/O senses used or IOT interfaces with devices), the sub-algorithms feeding into LLMs (e.g., text <-> picture conversion), or the novel command meta layer like in ChatGPT 4 or AutoGPT feeding a LLM. E. g., where are branding guidelines most important, in the corpus, the algorithms, or at the user interface, at the command layer, or in the AI elements ecosystem (e.g., selling access to training data in an AI marketplace)?

For this special issue, we encourage multidisciplinary research at the intersection of strategy with behavioral sciences, computer science, economics, finance, information systems, psychology, sociology, and other disciplines. We also encourage novel empirical approaches not typically used in marketing strategy research, ranging from unstructured data with deep learning models to qualitative studies and field experiments.

The special issue is open to all methodological approaches, including organizational studies, experimental studies, qualitative research, empirical modeling, and analytical papers. Conceptual papers would require very novel and useful insights. Research should be drawing on rigorous methodology to address substantive concerns. The special issue is also open to research that has the potential to inform regulation and public policy, so long as it relates to marketing phenomena.

Key Events/Dates:

  • A special track at the 20th anniversary Marketing Dynamics Conference will take place at Northeastern University (Boston) in September 2023.
    The track will provide a platform to share ongoing research and to provide timely feedback.
    Please note that submission to the special issue does not require participation in the conference. For more information about the conference, see
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  • We start processing papers for the special issue Oct 1, 2023. The submission deadline is March 31, 2024.

蹤獲扦夥厙t IJRM

IJRM is the official journal of the European Marketing Academy. It is now one of only five marketing journals that is a consensus A journal in most of the world (Rust 2015, p. 123)泭and the top non-US based marketing journal (Kannan 2018, p. 537). The journal has a healthy pipeline of papers and receives 800+ submissions per year. Importantly, IJRM is positioned as the supreme outlet for the most novel and innovative marketing papers. This means, at the edge, that IJRM is willing to take risk and publish potentially disruptive papers even if they are not perfect (actively acknowledging that there is no such thing as a perfect paper).

Here is the mission statement of the current editor team:

We strive to be authors first choice for their most novel, innovative, controversial, nonconformist, or otherwise disruptive marketing papers. We thereby hope to provide a vibrant platform for the exchange of novel and important marketing knowledge.

IJRM is also known for being a very author-friendly outlet. This includes fast turnaround times, a constructive and developmental review approach, and the avoidance of endless rounds of ping-pong between author teams and reviewers. If the authors wholeheartedly invest their deeds泭before泭the initial submission泭and泭during the review process, we hope to be able to bring good papers out faster than elsewhere. Time-to-market is too often neglected as a key factor in making marketing research relevant.

This special issue will be managed in this spirit.

Submissions

Papers targeting the special issue should be submitted through the IJRM submission system () and will undergo a similar review process as regularly submitted papers.

Important: when submitting your paper, please select as Article Type SI:泭AITIM.

We strongly encourage authors to submit before the deadline of March 31, 2024. If all authors submit on the same date, the competition for competent and constructive reviewers will be naturally more intense.

All manuscripts must strictly follow the guidelines of the泭International Journal of Research in Marketing泭(see泭).

The pre-publication PDF of accepted papers will be made available online ASAP. The special issue is tentatively scheduled to be published in the first half of 2025.

IJRM Editor Team:泭

IJRM Managing Editor:泭