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

Author: Liangyan Wang

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Brand-consumer relationship management via interactive marketing opportunities

Special Issue Call for Papers from Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing

Submission deadline 31 October 2023

Interactive marketing is a bidirectional form of value creation and mutual-influencing marketing process that has substantially evolved and matured from the traditional unidirectional manifestation of direct marketing (Wang, 2021). The prevalence of social media and digital marketing provides customers with dynamic, engaging, and relevant content via various platforms, which transform the way companies build brands and communicate to consumers. Brands are faced with both opportunities and challenges during customer relationship management due to new marketing approaches, new consumer profiles, and new social environments.

First, companies have been proposing various innovative forms of interactive marketing strategies to improve their relationship with customers, such as brand co-creation, virtual fans community, mobile and proximity marketing, gamification, and live-streaming on new social media (e.g. TikTok), etc. The application, effectiveness, and limitations of these interactive marketing strategies provide fruitful directions for exploration.

Beyond the new approaches mentioned above, marketers also need to have a cohesive understanding of how consumers from new generations such as Gen-Z respond to interactive marketing and how customer behavior evolves over time (e.g. in the phase of life-role transition). Moreover, changes in the social environment led to far different consumer behavior (e.g. post-COVID-19), such as rising digital adoption, growing consumers’ tendency toward smaller brands, caring measures to reassure consumers in offline stores, and home-based activities online, etc. (McKinsey, 2020). Post-Covid-19 consumer behavior in interactive marketing is an important topic that is currently being explored more by both academia and practitioners.

Despite the extensive research in Brand-Consumer relationship management, marketers still call for an advanced and cohesive understanding of how the emerging interactive marketing strategies are adopted and their effectiveness. To seek current and in-depth understandings of important topics in this area, this Special Issue calls for Brand-consumer relationship strategies within the domain of interactive marketing. All submissions to this special issue must focus on brand-consumer relationship management application in the context of interactive marketing.

Potential topics include, but not limited to, the followings:

• Investigating how emerging brands implement online and offline interactive activities to establish brand recognition;
• Measuring and evaluating the effectiveness of “brand co-creation”, a popular interactive marketing method across various industries and activities in recent years;
• Identifying the influence of potential brand crisis and exploring the corresponding reaction when a brand implements interactive marketing strategy;
• Inspecting how particular brands (e.g. anthropomorphic brands, cross-cultural brands) could conduct different forms of interactive marketing methods;
• Establishing long-standing and consumer-friendly virtual brand communities to enhance valuable brand-fans interaction;
• Studying new forms of social media that have emerged over time (e.g. Clubhouse, TikTok) and how they represent new opportunities for brands to interact with their target audience;
• Transforming and applying up-to-date marketing methods such as experience marketing, content marketing, and sensory marketing under the context of interactive marketing.

Submission Details:

Submission deadline 31 October 2023

Prior to submission, please review the JRIM submission guidelines at

https://www.emerald.com/insight/publication/issn/2040-7122

and submit online following the instructions provided. Please ensure you select this special issue from the drop-down menu when you submit.

For questions regarding the content of this special issue, please contact the guest editors:

Professor Liangyan Wang, Shanghai Jiaotong University, China, WLY@sjtu.edu.cn

Professor Eugene Chan, Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada, e34chan@ryerson.ca

About the guest editors:

Liangyan Wang is a Professor and the Chair of the Marketing Department at Antai College of Economics and Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. She completed her Ph.D. degree in Marketing from the University of California, Irvine. Her research interests primarily relate to brand management and consumer behaviour. Her work appears in top journals such as Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Research, Strategic Management Journal, Psychological Science, etc.

Eugene Y. Chan, is an associate professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada. He graduated from the University of Toronto with a Ph.D. degree and has a multi-disciplinary background in management, psychology and social sciences. In the past seven years, he has published more than 40 academic papers in international mainstream marketing journals (i.e., International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Consumer Psychology, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes). In addition, Professor Eugene Y. Chan is a member of the Editorial Review Board of the European Journal of Marketing and Psychology & Marketing. He also was awarded the 2019 Literati Award for Outstanding Reviewing from European Journal of Marketing.

References

McKinsey (2020), The Conflicted Continent: Ten Charts Show How COVID-19 Is Affecting Consumers in Europe, November 12, available at: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/ marketing-and-sales/our-insights/the-conflicted-continent-ten-charts-show-how-covid-19-is- affecting-consumers-in-europe.

Wang, C. L. (2021), ” New frontiers and future directions in interactive marketing”, Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, 15 (1), 1-9.