A Framework Of New Technologies In Marketing
Marketing has a long history of studying the adoption of new technologies as a scholarly field. This focus is certainly warranted, as studies consistently show that firms that invest heavily in new technology are more agile and have a significant competitive advantage over those that do not.
However, less attention has been paid in the literature to how new technologies lead to innovations in marketing techniques, tools, and strategies. Marketing scholars, in particular, are needed to develop theoretical paradigms of how marketers use technologies to gain a competitive advantage.
New technologies have transformed nearly every aspect of human life, including how businesses market their products and services to customers. More radical innovations are emerging alongside now-familiar innovations such as the Internet, increased computing capacity, mobile devices and applications, and social media. As discussed at various tech events, artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of things (IoT), and robotics significantly impact marketing practice.
Subsequently, it should come as no amaze that businesses in nearly every industry (e.g., retailing, manufacturing, healthcare, and finance) steadily increase their technology spending to achieve various goals. Many manufacturing firms, for example, seek cost savings through mechanized and robotic production processes, limiting labor costs while increasing production efficiencies.
Retailers and service providers are increasing their spending on online, mobile, and social media platforms to better communicate and connect with customers (both current and potential), resulting in increased revenue. Each new technology's early adopters change the rules of the game. Its fulfillment centers use robotic technologies to help employees, increase efficiencies, and reduce costs. As discussed at various technology conferences, "New Technologies in Marketing" presents cutting-edge scholarly research that recognizes the foundational role of new technologies in driving marketing theory and practice.
Scope of new technologies in marketing
Technology is defined as scientific knowledge and its practical applications. It acknowledges that technology can refer to the product or service that results from scientific knowledge and the knowledge itself. It avoids the need to distinguish between the product or service and the technology it encompasses, which can sometimes be difficult.
Because technology evolves, we define "new" as recent applications of scientific knowledge that others have not yet replaced. In other words, technology is "new" when it is still in the early stages of adoption by firms and/or consumers. Investigate a variety of new marketing technologies that are at one or both ends of the adoption cycle. As a result, marketing must employ a variety of research methodologies. In particular, more advanced technologies are more likely to have produced hard data because a sufficient number of firms or consumers have adopted the technology to allow the antecedents or consequences of adoption to be empirically observed and quantitatively analyzed.
Furthermore, at various tech conferences such as the Internet 2.0 Conference, we define new technologies as scientific knowledge or its application in the early adoption cycle for firms or consumers with the ability to control the activity, institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and interchanging offerings with value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.
Ways through which new technologies impact marketing
At a high level, we observe that new technologies influence marketing in four broad, interconnected ways:
New forms of consumer and firm interactions
We begin by discussing how new technology might enable new consumer-to-consumer, consumer-to-firm, firm-to-consumer, and firm-to-firm interactions. Many companies are now enabling direct consumer-to-consumer interactions by engaging consumers around brands. New technologies have frequently been effectively deployed by providing new marketing tools to improve firm–consumer interactions.
2. New data and analytics method
New technologies also generate new data and analytic methods. It proposes an analytic framework for analyzing the effectiveness of salespeople's facial expressions in Livestream selling using computer vision methods. It provides a method for businesses to assess the potential of new technologies to make informed product launch and retirement decisions. Furthermore, the Internet 2.0 Conference depicts a future in which consumers may consent to use their genetic data for customer targeting and new product development.
The potential for new technologies to provide new marketing tools and techniques that lead to product and service marketing innovations. It demonstrates how computer vision can use AI to optimize personal selling via live streaming. It examines the effectiveness of AI-based "word of a machine" and the effectiveness of augmented reality in retail.
4. New strategic frameworks
Finally, new technologies allow for developing new marketing strategies and strategic frameworks. It envisions digital platforms as locations for consumer crowdsourcing and product and service crowdfunding. It proposes a framework for incorporating the impact of genetics into consumer behavior theory and uses that framework to provide an overview of marketing uses of genetic data. It demonstrates the importance of new strategic frameworks in comprehending the impact of new technologies on the marketing domain.
New technologies fundamentally alter marketing decision making
After discussing the four major ways new technologies influence marketing practice, we present a framework for understanding how they improve marketing decision-making and the associated firm and market dynamics. Digital data-capture technology, which generates data on consumer firm interactions via images, video, speech, and text, among other channels, has also enabled large-scale field experiments, allowing businesses to assess the causal effects of their marketing actions. Marketers can use these experiments to optimize website designs, effectively retarget advertising, assess the effects of new marketing tools, and attribute effects to marketing actions throughout the customer journey.
This special interdisciplinary issue focusing on the future of technology and marketing has our support. Working in interdisciplinary teams allows researchers addressing these issues to tackle complex problems in collaboration with other stakeholders such as industry representatives, firms, government, and nonprofit organizations.
Attending technology conferences in the USA will also provide insight into the best practices for driving growth and efficiency and emerging concerns in this field. In these domains, research must establish the fundamental effects of various technologies. "New Technologies in Marketing" covers a wide range of research that looks at how new technologies influence marketing practice and can stimulate further research. It demonstrates that new technology is spawning new types of data and analytic methods, creating marketing innovations, and giving rise to new strategic marketing frameworks by elucidating how new technology enables new forms of interaction among consumers and firms.