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This paper aims to establish how strategic target-market selection decisions are shaped, challenged and driven in response to the rapidly evolving technological landscape. The authors critically evaluate the implications of these changes for the role of marketers and the organizational function of marketing.

The research uses qualitative methods. Key-informant interviews are conducted among senior organizational practitioners within client-side organizations, digital agencies and strategic marketing consultancies, seeking to contrast their views.

The findings reveal an erosion of responsibility for the integrated strategic role of marketing decision-making. In particular, the authors reveal that the evolving digital landscape has precipitated a sense of crisis for marketers and the role of marketing within the firm. This extends beyond simply remedying a skills-gap and is triggering a transformation that has repercussions for the future of marketing and its practice, thus diminishing functional accountability.

The findings have long-term implications for marketing as a strategic organizational function of the firm and for marketing as a practice.

The study considers an increasingly digitalized marketplace and the associated impact of big data for the function of marketing. It reveals the changing scope of strategic marketing practice and functional accountability.

Regulatory initiatives and related technological shifts have been imposing restrictions on data-driven marketing (DDM) practices. This paper aims to find the main restrictions for DDM and the key management theories applied to investigate the consequences of these restrictions.

The authors conducted a unified bibliometric analysis with 104 publications retrieved from both Scopus and Web of Science, followed by a qualitative, in-depth systematic literature review to identify the management theories in literature and inform a research agenda.

The fragmentation of the research outcomes was overcome by the identification of 3 main clusters and 11 management theories that structured 18 questions for future research.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper sets for the first time a frontier between almost three decades where DDM evolved with no significative restrictions, grounded on innovations and market autoregulation, and an era where data privacy, anti-trust and competition and data sovereignty regulations converge to impose structural changes, requiring scholars and practitioners to rethink the roles of data at the strategic level of the firm.