INTEREST CATEGORY: INNOVATION AND TECH
POSTING TYPE: Revisits

Author: Cecilia Nalagon

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IJRM Call for Papers

Special Issue on:

Contemporary Marketing Strategy Research: New Perspectives for the Digital Economy

Edited by Gaia Rubera (Bocconi University), Kapil Tuli (Singapore Management University) and Stefan Wuyts (Penn State University)

The emergence and rapid diffusion of digital technology has changed the way in which firms operate and interact with customers and other stakeholders. At the same time, new types of data (e.g., big data, unstructured, biometric, and location data) and tools to analyze them are opening doors for researchers to investigate topics that were previously hard to examine. While research in marketing strategy has been making strides to adjust to the hyperconnectivity, automation, and digital interactions that are reshaping economies around the world, there is significant potential to provide novel theoretical insights and managerial prescriptions that are better aligned with the business landscape of the 21^st century.

The domain of strategic marketing has been conceptualized as “the study of organizational, inter-organizational, and environmental phenomena of major importance from the standpoint of long-term performance of organizations, and concerned with:

• Consumers, customers, competitors and collaborators
• Behaviors of organizations involving the use of marketing resources toward the creation, communication and delivery of products that offer value to customers in exchanges with organizations.
• Behaviors of organizations in the marketplace involving the use of marketing resources to engender specific affects, cognitions and behaviors in customers.” (Varadarajan, 2020)

This special issue seeks to publish innovative papers that address marketing strategy challenges and opportunities in the context of a digitized world. Examples of topics that might be addressed include (but are not restricted to):

• Which resources and capabilities of firms are likely to grow in importance as drivers of sustained competitive advantage and long-term performance in the digital economy? Relatedly, what are the consequences of digital transformation for market competition and the nature of the competitive landscape?
• What are alternative strategies and/or strategic orientations of firms that can be inferred from their communications with shareholders and investors (in their SEC fillings), and/or communications with consumers (through their participation on social media platforms) using computer assisted text analysis?
• How should B2B firms adapt their strategies to engage customers, create business solutions and experiences, and manage the sales process in the light of new digital opportunities and challenges? How are B2B marketing strategies affected by the digital proficiency of B2B firms and their supply chain partners? What are the consequences of digital technologies for organizational buying behavior and the marketing/sales interface?
• How can senior marketing managers leverage the emerging dominance of social media for interacting with customers, competitors, and regulators? Is “social commerce” a fundamentally new approach to marketing strategy? Does the social media strategy of a firm significantly differ in the western world social media, e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, as compared to China, e.g., WeChat, TikTok, Pinduoduo?
• How do traditional marketing strategy conceptual pillars e.g., Market Orientation, First Mover Advantage, relate to emerging theories of Marketing Excellence and Marketing Agility? How do these traditional pillars interact with these new conceptualizations in driving firm performance?
• How do firms have to adapt their marketing activities when moving from a digital to a social media environment? How can firms cope with the fact that in a social media context, other consumers can see how a firm treats the other consumers? To what extent do we need to change traditional marketing strategies (e.g., handling complaints) or do we need to create new ones?
• What is the role of marketing in an algorithmic world, where platforms’ algorithms strongly influence consumers’ decisions by showing some products or ads? To what extend do firms need to change their marketing activities to make sure that they remain relevant in the consumers’ mind?
• How can managers and researchers perform traditional marketing research activities with unstructured data available on social networks? What new insights can we gain from the analysis of textual and image data? What new type of data can firms leverage to analyze their market and customers?
• What does innovation mean in the digital economy? How can we expand existing theories to digital and business model innovations? What are the antecedents and consequences of these types of innovations and do we need to expand the extant incremental/radical dichotomy to include new categorizations that can better capture the essence of innovation in the new economy?
• How can firms grow and maintain brand equity in an environment when the boundaries of brand ownership are being blurred, and when consumers and influencers are shaping the brand message and brand associations?
• To what extent and in what manner do brands engage in various forms of social and environmental activism, how do they select issues to focus on that are aligned with the image they seek to uphold and can activism strengthen their competitive advantage? What marketing assets can protect firms from scandals and boycott activities on social platforms?
• How are firms’ interactions with stakeholders other than shareholders and customers impacting their marketing strategy? How does marketing strategy impact the behavior of employees, suppliers, partners, and policy makers, and conversely, how does the behavior of these stakeholder shape the marketing strategy of firms?
• What are the consequences of the digital economy for the management and study of interorganizational relationships? How can we expand governance theories to accommodate complex organizational forms and ecosystems that extend beyond traditional value chains? What are the key assumptions, assertions, constructs, and relationships of novel value creation and value appropriation theory that accommodates such networked organizational forms?
• What is the role of marketing strategy in balancing the importance of traditional foci of customer centricity and shareholder wealth, with the increasing relevance of environmental and social responsibilities?

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.

About 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)[1] and “the top non-US based marketing journal” (Kannan 2018, p. 537)[2]. 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 incoming 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 before the initial submission and 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 (http://www.editorialmanager.com/ijrm) and will undergo a similar review process as regularly submitted papers.

Important: when submitting your paper, please select as Article Type “SI: CMSR”.

We start processing submissions in February 2022, with the final deadline for submissions being June 30, 2022. We strongly encourage authors to submit before the deadline. 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 International Journal of Research in Marketing (see

https://www.elsevier.com/journals/international-journal-of-research-in-marketing/0167-8116/guide-for-authors).

The pre-publication PDF of accepted papers will be made available online asap. The special issue is scheduled to be published in the first half of 2024.

Please contact Kapil Tuli at kapilrtuli@smu.edu.sg in case you have questions with regard to the special issue.

Incoming IJRM Editor Team:

Martin Schreier (EIC), WU Vienna, Austria, martin.schreier@wu.ac.at

Renana Peres (Co-Editor), Hebrew University, Israel, renana.peres@mail.huji.ac.il

David Schweidel (Co-Editor), Emory University, U.S., dschweidel@emory.edu

Alina Sorescu (Co-Editor), Texas A&M, U.S., asorescu@mays.tamu.edu

IJRM Managing Editor:

Cecilia D Nalagon, cnalagon@umd.edu

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167811615000543

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167811618300533