MOVING INTERACTIVE MARKETING FORWARD VENKATESH SHANKAR AND EDWARD C. MALTHOUSE
EDITORIAL VENKATESH SHANKAR is Professor of Marketing and Coleman Chair in Marketing, Mays Business School, Texas A & M University, College Station; e-mail:
[email protected]
EDWARD C. MALTHOUSE is an Associate Professor in
This is our first editorial together as co-editors of the Journal of Interactive Marketing (JIM). We first want to thank the outgoing co-editor, Russ Winer, for his dedication to developing the quality and reputation of JIM. We also thank the previous editors, John Deighton and Rashi Glazer, for their vision and efforts to establish the journal, and Don Schultz for starting the Journal of Direct Marketing, the predecessor to JIM. The field of interactive marketing is rapidly changing and expanding. Using multiple devices such as kiosks, PCs, handheld devices, and multiple interaction forms such as mail, the Web, and face-to-face meeting, customers and other stakeholders and the companies with whom they do business, are now interacting in ways vastly different from those in the past. Firms’ interactions with end users are managed by customer relationship management (CRM) systems and databases that enable the companies to customize contacts in real-time across multiple media platforms and channels. Many communications between organizations and consumers leave a data trail that can be analyzed, so that the effect of the contact can be measured and future communications can be optimized. The public is being inundated by marketing messages. These dramatic changes raise issues of consumer privacy
Integrated Marketing Communications, The authors thank Arvind Rangaswamy (Pennsylvania State University) and Tom Collinger
Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL; e-mail:
[email protected]
(Northwestern University) for comments on earlier drafts. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. and Direct Marketing Educational Foundation, Inc. JOURNAL OF INTERACTIVE MARKETING VOLUME 20 / NUMBER 1 / WINTER 2006 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/dir.20057
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Journal of Interactive Marketing
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Use of Understanding of Customers, Technology, Other Resources
Interactive Marketing: Create and Manage Customer Value and Relationships for Enhancing Shareholder Value Brands, Ideas, Product/Service Offerings, Messages
Communication and Delivery Channels and Contact Points
TM
FIGURE 1 Illustration of Interactive Marketing
and trust, and challenge the ways organizations communicate with consumers. Adding to these changes are the increasingly blurred lines between marketing messages, news, media, and entertainment. There is a consolidation and collaboration of industries including advertising and marketing agencies, database and technology companies, consumer-research organizations, and media and entertainment companies. The current vision for JIM, articulated in Winer and Shankar (2003), is ideally suited for these dynamic conditions: Our vision is to be a premier academic journal with high managerial relevance in the area of interactive marketing. We want JIM to be a thought leader and catalyst for shaping ideas and issues associated with electronic, interactive, and direct marketing environments. We would like to continually improve the quality of papers published and raise the awareness and visibility of the journal. We plan to publish leading edge ideas, methodologies, and insights in the area of interactive marketing. The papers should be managerially important and should have the potential to impact managerial thinking and practice in this area. (p. 3) In this editorial, we would like to extend and clarify the vision for JIM by articulating an expanded scope of interactive marketing. Interactive marketing is an integrated exchange process by which an organization uses the understanding of customer behavior, technology, and other resources to create and manage customer value and collaborative relationships and enhance shareholder value through relevant brands,
products/service offerings, ideas, and messages communicated and delivered to the right customers through appropriate channels and contact points at appropriate times. We view this definition1 as a simple and concise way of characterizing what Deighton and Glazer (1998) described as “a customer information-driven perspective on the increasing appropriate way of integrated strategic marketing decisionmaking” (p. 2). As illustrated in Figure 1, the use of understanding of customers, technology, and other resources (top corner) indicates that qualitative and quantitative marketing research, the analysis of large databases of customer information (e.g., transactional histories, Web logs, call-center logs, etc.), technology, and theories of customer behavior enable interactive marketers to understand their customers. This understanding and the use of resources are necessary to create relevant brands and product/service offerings as well as the ideas and messages to communicate to the customers or other stakeholders (lower left corner). Customer interactions with the brand or firm are made through multiple communication and delivery channels and contact points (lower right corner), including traditional media, Web sites, wireless devices, podcasts, blogs, and so on. They are often, but not always, collaborative, adaptive, technologyenabled, and customized with customer-level data. All contacts must be managed across customers, communication and distribution channels, contact points,
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The motivation for this definition and the triad in Figure 1 are from strategic planning discussions for the Department of Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University.
MOVING INTERACTIVE MARKETING FORWARD
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and time with the goal of creating customer value and building long-term relationships with the right customers and maximizing shareholder value. With this expanded scope of interactive marketing, open research questions abound. JIM has earned a reputation for being a leading publication for highquality research on these topics. We plan to build on this reputation by continuing to publish cutting-edge concepts, theories, methods, and applications in the
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broadened scope of interactive marketing. We invite all those who do research in interactive marketing to submit their best work to JIM.
REFERENCES Deighton, J., & Glazer, R. (1998). From the Editors. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 12(1), 2–4. Winer, R.S., & Shankar, V. (2003). A New Vision for the Journal. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 17(1), 2–4.
