Announcement
IJRM Special Issue on THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY

Guest Editors: Jehoshua Eliashberg (University of Pennsylvania), Thorsten Hennig-Thurau (University of Münster and City University London), Charles B. Weinberg (University of British Columbia) and Berend Wierenga (Erasmus University Rotterdam).

The International Journal of Research in Marketing invites submissions for a special issue on The Entertainment Industry. Although early academic research on the entertainment industry focused on the TV and movie industries, recent work has expanded to consider such fields as home video, games, music, performing and visual arts, sports events, books, and apps. In this special issue we take a broad approach to the entertainment industry, which is characterized by three elements: it is creativity-driven, its products are experiential in nature, and, marketing has played an increasingly important, but sometimes controversial, role in research and practice.

There are many reasons for an increased interest in the entertainment industry. First, the industry has high economic importance in the global economy, with global entertainment industry revenues exceeding US$ 1.7 trillion in 2012. Second, technical innovations have changed the dynamics of traditional industries and led to the development of new ones, making entertainment a hotbed of innovation in both content creation and distribution. Technology has also dramatically changed the market scope and competitive structure from largely being locally based to now often being globally oriented, and presenting new challenges such as piracy. Third, digitization of the media has also influenced the way people consume entertainment; the industry has to adapt to consumers becoming increasingly active and networked. For example, many consumers now multi-task, use multiple platforms, and use multiple media formats (e.g., movies, games, and social media) interdependently. Fourth, the entertainment industry has high social and cultural significance. The tension between “mass culture” and “high culture,” and between global markets and local tastes, and claims such as the “internet is free” are only some of the sources of controversy and research attention.

This special issue of IJRM will focus on the latest thinking and research in the field of entertainment. Our goal is to be broad in terms of the research questions and methodologies employed and in the range of topics to be studied. In this special issue, we anticipate providing researchers with an editorial team of expert reviewers passionately devoted to the entertainment industry and readers with a focused place to find the most creative research in the field at the highest level of research quality. While we invite a broad array of research approaches and topics, as indicated above, we are particularly interested in high-quality research that has an impact on practice. Examples of topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• The role of creativity in generating new products and distribution mechanisms
• Products and product development for entertainment
• Distribution channels, including digital channels
• Diffusion and adoption of entertainment goods, including the role of social media
• Consumer behavior, demand prediction and advertising for entertainment media
• Business models and pricing in the entertainment industry
• Managerial, organizational, and institutional issues
• Marketing across entertainment types and media formats
• The influence of mobility on entertainment

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