Digital Marketing Strategies

• Digital technologies are essential for gaining a competitive edge in marketing and retailing
• Managers face challenges in strategically using these technologies and must adapt their digital strategies
• A deeper understanding of consumer attitudes towards digital technologies is needed

Strategic Opportunities

• Academic marketing thought leadership aids in transforming challenges into strategic opportunities
• Technological innovations create customer, firm, and societal value
• The framework focuses on the strategic resources managers use to fulfill the potential of digital technologies
• Insights from 16 boardroom interviews with senior marketing managers resulted in three themes
  • Decentralized marketing
  • Metamodern customer experiences
  • Marketing mechanization
• Additional thought-leading research is being motivated as a research agenda

Digital Technologies

• Digital technologies are essential for effective strategic marketing
• Grabbing customer attention
• Securing patronage
• Maintaining loyalty
• Digital technologies have set a high bar for delivering value due to significant investment costs
• Companies leverage digital technologies
  • To differentiate themselves from competitors
  • To improve operational efficiency
• Global investments in AI are continually increasing
  • Expected to increase by over 1250% from 2020 to 2028
  • Reaching an estimated $641 billion in spending

Technology-Driven Marketing Innovation

• Provides firms with new options for creating brand value
• Important for businesses to consider how the embrace of digital technologies affect customers and society
• Understand how value can be generated for customers and other shareholders

Understanding Consumers

• Important to understand how consumers respond to new technologies
• Robots, chatbots
• AI-driven applications
• Robots that appear too human-like can be off-putting and alienate consumers
• Requires careful consideration, planning, and user training when deploying new technologies
• Important to balance a technological push with customer needs

Online Retailers

• Strive to create digital customer experiences that match or exceed physical counterparts
• Enhancing customer experiences
• Enhancing customer engagement
• Mitigating privacy concerns
• Enabling managers to access underserved markets

Special Issue Contributions

• The articles explore various emerging technologies
  • AI applications
  • Internet of Things (IoT)
  • Voice versus typed search modalities
  • Virtual agents
  • Natural Language Processing (NLP)
  • Combinations of digital technologies
• Different strategic resources are addressed
  • Design
  • Ability to change AI features
  • Software development
  • Data storage and sharing
  • Marketing assets
• A range of relevant outcomes are being investigated
  • Attitudes
  • Purchase intentions
  • Brand value
  • Firm performance

Overarching Framework

• Transforms strategic resources into value for customers, firms, and society
• Contextualized with insights from 16 interviews with marketing executives and senior managers
• Common themes regarding future applications of digital technology in marketing
• Combines these insights to construct a research agenda

Strategic Imperatives

• Firms that frequently experiment with and adopt, emerging digital technologies can lead their industries
• Fosters innovations related to the customer experience and design, production, promotion, and delivery efforts
• Consumers have sought to limit physical contact and have adjusted their purchase behaviors

Digital Technology-Enabling Strategic Outcomes

• Managers must anticipate technologies impacts on
  • Purchase journeys
  • Customer perceptions
  • Service delivery
• Customer-firm relationships determine customers' willingness to transmit digital signals for personalized marketing
• Framework to highlight the effects of
  • Consumer signals
  • Organizational decisions
  • Consumer reactions
  • Pre-purchase stage
  • Purchase stage
  • Post-purchase stage

Modality

• Modality that customers use to interact with digital technologies affects their behavior
• Typed interactions with a search page enhances people's purchase intentions and behaviors
• Typing puts customers in a more deliberative mindset, which influences their customer journey and purchase behaviors
• Voice search features, findings suggest the importance of action-oriented communication
• Dynamic communications are important.
• Data sharing through technology can raise concerns about privacy and security
• Firms must exhibit caution when deploying emerging digital technologies
• Interactions with the firm that rely on such technologies could strain relationships

Brands

• Outside their purchase journeys, customers may perceive brands differently if they use emerging technologies
• Luxury brands
  • Customers perceive hedonic products as less attractive if they feature AI-based designs
  • Due to the diminished emotional value of these products
  • Negative effect of AI-based product design disappears for functional products
• Service interactions facilitated by emerging digital technologies may provide convenience benefits but also produce negative outcomes
  • Heightened privacy concerns
  • Diminished well-being
  • Increasing awareness of the problem
  • Improving knowledge of problem resolution methods
  • Implementing solutions

Artificial Empathy

• Situations in which artificial empathy in automated customer-firm interactions are desirable
• Even as they acknowledge that some applications of artificial empathy could harm these relations
• AI providing greater artificial empathy results in improved customer experiences and outcomes

AI Value Creation

• Firms invest in AI applications and increase the effectiveness of other marketing investments
• AI-focused firms are more profitable, with greater operating efficiency and better returns on marketing investments
• Investment on voice assistant devices, such as Amazon's Alexa
  • Announcements of various capabilities in their devices can influence firm value
  • Informational capabilities had a positive effect on the influence of announcement on firm value
  • Use of AI voice assistant device features used by customers as signals of intelligence and artificiality, and in turn influence their evaluations

Natural Language Processing

• Al-powered natural language processing can help firms analyze unstructured data and uncover consumer sentiment and behaviors
  • Better brand positioning
  • Innovative product developments
  • Expanded competitive advantages
  • Agile marketing communications
• AI investments strengthen the power of the marketing department and improve investors' responses to new product developments
• AI has the potential to enhance the value created by marketing strategies and investments in emerging digital technologies

Ethical Implications

• Digital technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning can enhance predictions
• Efficiency increases could come at the expense of equity
• Algorithmic bias - AI algorithms might reinforce existing forms of inequality
• Diversity in programming communities
  • May be reflected in how algorithms are written and deployed
• Algorithms are being trained with data sets that themselves reflect existing biases
  • For example, voice recognition software lacks data related to African-American dialects
• Algorithms may pick up on biased individual actions
  • Human resources department historically defined its selection criteria to seek out students from undergraduate institutions that are not inclusive

Algorithmic Bias

• Many of these concerns about algorithmic bias and algorithmic exclusion pertain to algorithms used to inform hiring, credit, education, and judicial proceedings
• In trying to maximize cost-effectiveness, an advertising algorithm might limit advertisements encouraging STEM careers to female candidates, because accessing women is relatively more expensive than accessing men

Boardroom Insights

• This special issue presents research insights into how digital technologies can affect marketing strategies and customers
• Senior marketing practitioners' perspectives on the future of digital technologies in marketing
• Explored how digital technologies feature in these executives' marketing practice, then probed some specific potential applications of technologies
  • AI
  • Extended realities
  • Metaverse
  • Robotics
  • Virtual agents
  • Blockchain
  • Internet of Things
  • Synthetic content
• Interview findings
  • Decentralized marketing
  • Metamodern customer experiences
  • Marketing automation

Decentralized marketing

• Web 3.0 technologies appear likely to usher in an era called decentralized marketing
• More democratized brands will center on
  • Sustainability
  • Provenance assurance
  • Privacy
  • Security protection
  • Innovative digital products
• Rethinking how, when, and why they engage with customers
• MCQ line embeds near-field communication (NFC) chips in garments
  • Both customers and supply chain partners can verify their ecological and social sustainability production credentials
  • Assure their provenance by tracking the contributions of each supply chain partner
  • Brand transparency informs customers about the sustainability of their favorite brands
  • Incentivizes those brands to clean up their manufacturing processes and supply chains
• Beyond offering more information to consumers, decentralized marketing aids firms in protecting customers' privacy and securing existing information
• Retain anonymity
  • Retain anonymity but still enable marketers a certain level of granularity to select customers based upon a broad index of interests and attributes

Metamodern customer experiences

• Advances in alternative reality technologies combined with recent innovations in the metaverse, can provide metamodern customer experiences
  • Hyper-realistic immersive brand narratives that account for customer diversity
• Spend marketing money of new platforms
• VR and AR experiences bridge the gap between physical and digital
• Can design a virtual experience with AR or VR
• Should be authentic to your audience and what they expect from within certain environments
• Negative outcomes of customer interactions

Marketing Mechanization

• Marketing mechanization relies on machine learning and AI to go beyond simple count metrics to assess, evaluate, and forecast customer behavior
  • Automatically adjusting marketing strategies and customer service delivery
• Machine learning and AI helps to quantify and qualify the massive data you get from the human experience
  • AI can predict where the human gaze would go in each moment
• There is a need for contribution from human marketing managers and employees
• AI and advancements in machine learning helps employees and technology better collaborate in serving customers
• AI allows marketers to become more creative because it will remove some menial tasks that a lot of us are doing
  • Free up more time for marketers to be creative and strategic
• Mechanized tools could become vehicles for further inequalities across the globe