Marketing innovations and digital technologies: A systematic review, proposed framework, and future research agenda
Gerard A. Athaide, Jaihyun Jeon, S. P. Raj, K. Sivakumar, Guiyang Xiong
kHUB post date: January 2025
Originally published: 08 May 2024 (PDMA JPIM • Vol 42, Issue 1 • January 2025)
Read time: 52 minutes
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In recent years, scholars and practitioners have increasingly recognized the profound impact of digital technologies (DTs) on reshaping organizations' value propositions and their ability to create, communicate, and deliver value to stakeholders. Given this heightened attention, it is imperative to comprehensively examine how DTs affect marketing innovations. This study reports the results of a systematic review of empirical research on DTs' role in marketing innovations. Specifically, it identifies a comprehensive list of technologies and investigates their relevance in enabling innovative approaches within marketing research, strategy formulation (segmentation, targeting, and positioning), and implementation (product, promotion, place, and price). The study synthesizes emerging themes in the literature, pinpoints research gaps, proposes a 3As framework for classifying DTs in marketing, and delineates future research directions in this pivotal domain.
Practitioner Points
- Smartly leveraging digital technologies (DTs) for marketing innovations can enhance the customer experience and firm performance—an important source of competitive advantage.
- This study critically reviews empirical research-based evidence on the relevance of a comprehensive list of DTs for the entire gamut of marketing activities to simultaneously provide a broad as well as granular perspective on the role of DTs in marketing innovations.
- Faced with an onslaught of new DTs, this study provides managers with guidance regarding which technologies can be best leveraged for marketing effectiveness, i.e., it helps address the “toys versus tools” dilemma.