When Nothing is What it Seems: A Digital Marketing Research Agenda

Abstract

Digital breakthroughs continue to challenge prevailing understandings of markets and marketing practices, bringing exciting opportunities to reimagine our offerings. Looking through the lens of digital surrealism, we identify key trends emerging in the field: (1) Is AR (Augmented Reality) for real?; (2) There is no better PR than GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation); (3) A persona is not a persona; (4) Min(e)d your language, and; (4 ¾) Raise your voice. Maybe. Based on these trends we develop an agenda for future research that enables the realization of the opportunities that the digital space offers. Framing the picture Rene Magritte, painter, philosopher and marketer avant-la-lettre, is perhaps most famous for his series of paintings called the Treachery of Images. The centrepiece of the series is a detailed picture of a pipe and has as its pay-off slogan, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (This is not a pipe). This masterpiece of Surrealism that challenges the convention that objects correspond to words and images invokes the tensions between life and art, truth and fiction, and reality and irreality. In today's digital marketing landscape, Magritte's insistence that nothing may be what it seems is perhaps more important than ever. The growing momentum of digitization and the scale of disruption associated with it has had a profound impact on current marketing practice. Both as a painter and advertising executive, Magritte would argue that Uber is not a taxi company, Airbnb is not a hotel, Bitcoin is not a bank, Cleo (.com) is not a person and that YouTube is not TV. These observations reflect that firms have embraced interactive technologies to engage with their customers and disintermediation has shortened the distance and time-to-market, while increasing the scope for one-to-one communication on a mass scale, deploying Big Data analytics. In turn, social mediaempowered consumers are now connected to other consumers and co-create and distribute branded content which is increasingly visual and selfie-centred. The reality of customer experiences is augmented and most consumers are happy to suspend their disbelief when chatting with virtual employees powered by machine learning. This digital surrealism comes with its own tensions. Firms are still locked into annual planning cycles for strategy development with a habitual execution phase by the end of Q3. Consequently, only a small minority feels that their current business models meet the agility and flexibility needs of a marketplace that keeps digitizing at lightning speed. At the same time, advances in knowledge struggle to keep up with the accelerating complexity of marketing practice. There is a paucity of paradigms that can help guiding digital marketing

Touching the Untouchable: Exploring Multi-Sensory Augmented Reality in the Context of Online Retailing

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“…Fifita et al, 2015) as well as specific topics of interest to multiple disciplines. Examples of these are digital marketing (de Ruyter et al, 2018) and customer engagement (Abdul-Ghani et al, 2019). To extend the sports analogy, some consumers might be more interested in discussing team composition while others may be interested in discussing the mistakes of various umpires.…”

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“…As customers start to engage in shared decision making with social AR, a fundamental premise is that both recommenders and decision makers feel comfortable with providing and accepting advice through the technology. This premise has not been systematically addressed in extant research and more insights are needed into the process and outcomes of using social AR (Hilken et al 2018;de Ruyter et al 2018). Relatedly, research offers little guidance on optimal AR configurations of sharing formats (photo or video) and communication modes (text and/or images) for firms wishing to support shared decision making (Javornik 2016;de Ruyter et al 2018).…”

“…This premise has not been systematically addressed in extant research and more insights are needed into the process and outcomes of using social AR (Hilken et al 2018;de Ruyter et al 2018). Relatedly, research offers little guidance on optimal AR configurations of sharing formats (photo or video) and communication modes (text and/or images) for firms wishing to support shared decision making (Javornik 2016;de Ruyter et al 2018). Addressing these gaps in the knowledge base is pertinent as customer adoption and conversion rates for AR remain incremental and/or speculative (ARtillry 2019; Gartner 2018).…”