Special Issue on The Past, Present and Future of Interactive Marketing

Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing

ISSN: 2040-7122

Article publication date: 4 March 2014

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Citation

Zahay, D. (2014), "Special Issue on The Past, Present and Future of Interactive Marketing", Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, Vol. 8 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/JRIM-12-2013-0085

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited


Special Issue on The Past, Present and Future of Interactive Marketing

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, Volume 8, Issue 1

The year 2013 was a good one for our journal. As of this writing, we received 84 submissions and are maintaining a 30 percent acceptance rate. We reconstituted the editorial advisory board those using the structure of co-AEs for the Americas, Asia and Europe. The EAB will not only be writing and reviewing articles, but developing further contacts for our journal by representing us at conferences and helping with the marketing of our journal. We had a well-attended in-person board meeting at the Marketing EDGE Conference in Chicago in October, where for the second year in a row we awarded a cash prize for best research paper. We receive many submissions from the attendees to that conference and are seeing many other submissions from conferences we attended this year. As usual, we are receiving excellent support from our publisher Emerald, including help with our listing and ranking by respected academic organizations (Figure 1).

It is appropriate then with all these changes and our focus of strength going forward that our first issue of the year be based on our call for papers that focused on "The Past, Present and Future of Interactive Marketing". Certainly the world of interactive marketing is expanding. The term interactive marketing was meant to denote that marketing has become a true conversation with the customer. The customer has a strong voice in this conversation in the form of social media and this trend toward customer control of marketing is reflected in our two papers in this issue on social media marketing.

Figure 1

While we certainly will see the trend of interactive marketing in the form of social media marketing continue to expand internationally, we are also seeing interactive or digital marketing become increasingly important to the entire organization. For example, developing strategy also now means understanding how people search for a product since most product decisions begin online. The papers in this special issue emphasize the expansion of the concept of interactive marketing throughout the organization and the world. Because of these trends, for editing this issue I particularly sought out thought pieces that would help us in charting our research directions for the future. Therefore, this issue has two conceptual pieces and two research pieces.

For the conceptual papers, the first paper is by industry leader and EAB member Merlin David Stone and his co-author Neil David Woodcock titled "Interactive, direct and digital marketing – a future that depends on better use of business intelligence". The paper suggests a framework for thinking about interactive marketing as fueling the business intelligence processes of the firm, what some might call data analytics. I certainly would like to see more papers of this nature exploring how the information from interactive marketing processes can be used to improve the operation of the entire organization. Along a similar theme of expanding the research focus of the journal, the second paper, by Richard E. Plank and Robert Hooker, "Sales and operations planning: using the internet and internet based tools to further supply chain integration" provides an integrated literature review suggesting how we might research the B2B side of interactive marketing, particularly as it relates to the operational processes.

The two research-based papers in this issue focus around broad trends in social media. It might be said that 2013 was the year that social media exploded in usage and in importance worldwide. The third paper by Wen Gong, Rodney L. Stump and Zhan G. Li, "Global use and access of social networking web sites: a national culture perspective", is a good start in the empirical testing of differences in social media use across cultures. The final paper by Juan D. Borrero, Shumaila Y. Yousafzai, Uzma Javed and Kelly L. Page "Perceived value of social networking sites (SNS) in students’ expressive participation in social movements" indicates what needs to be in place for social media to be used by students in social movements, another growing trend worldwide.

Enjoy this issue. The future of interactive marketing, like that of the journal is robust and there are many opportunities for research contributions in this area. I look forward to your comments and your contributions to the journal in 2014.

Debra Zahay
Editor-in-Chief

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