Abstract
We are living in a world of data abundance and rapid technological advances in the digital realm. The consequences for marketing practices have been transformative. The Marketing Edge and Journal of Business Research sponsored this special issue to address the need for research in this domain. We draw upon past literature to trace how data-driven marketing practices and adoption of digital technologies have helped transform and expand the scope of marketing from a function that was primarily related to analyzing advertisements, to crafting analytics-driven customer-centric marketing, to a function that is fiscally responsible and increasingly technology enabled. The collection of nine studies in this special issue richly describes the challenges that marketing practitioners face and highlights research issues that need to be addressed.
1. Introduction
The application of data and digital technologies in marketing has undergone several interesting stages of transformation. Each stage has helped transform and augment the scope and role of the marketing function within the organization. We draw upon past literature and systematically track the applications of data-driven marketing and digital technologies over time. We find that the historical evolution of data-driven marketing may be divided into five discrete stages as described Section 2. Each stage describes how data-driven applications (which were later enabled by digital technologies) were influenced by the business environment in the respective stage and how this ultimately contributed to the expansion of the role and scope of marketing within an organization. In a subsequent section (Section 3) we introduce the special issue of the Journal of Business Research based on the theme of ‘Marketing in a Data-Driven Digital World’ and provide an overview of the studies included in the special issue.
3.8. Synergistic Effects of Market Orientation
The pace of business is changing faster than ever before. Inability to respond to changes can often pose serious challenges to survival for business. In the study titled ‘Synergistic Effects of Market Orientation Implementation and Internalization & Its Impact on Firm Performance - Direct Marketing Service Provider Industry’, Abbu and Gopalakrishna (2020) build upon the important construct of market orientation as a means for firm performance. More specifically, the authors introduce market orientation internalization as a mediator between market orientation implementation and firm performance relationship. In addition, they conceptualize the impact of learning orientation as a moderator that strengthens the relationship between market orientation implementation and market orientation internalization.
