Journal of Marketing Management

Academic marketing, at its roots, is the discipline of markets. It has also, always, been a market of disciplines. The academic practice of marketing emerged in the early twentieth century at the intersection of economics and psychology (Agnew, 1941). Half a century later, the Ford and Carnegie Foundations promoted a reform of management sciences that paved the way for engineering, mathematics, physics, but also psychology, anthropology, sociology, literary criticism, and even the neurosciences to invade the discipline (Miller & Rose, 1997; Schneider & Woolgar, 2012; Schwarzkopf, 2009; Tadajewski & Saren, 2008). Each newcomer has pretended to offer a better way of ‘mediating’ (Akrich et al., 2002; Hennion et al., 1989; McFall, 2014; Musselin & Paradeise, 2005) markets, or even to replace previous expertise with a more direct relationship between supply and demand. However, and ironically, this effort always ended up imposing a new mediation: the newcomer’s own (Cochoy, 1998).

The latest and most profound example in this respect is undoubtedly the entry of computer science into marketing. The recent burst of big data analytics, digital science, network analysis, machine learning and artificial intelligence has dramatically altered the technologies, skills and knowledge at the centre of contemporary marketing practices with profound implications for marketing as an academic discipline. Some work has begun to address these developments, for example by focusing on how the relationship between information technology and market has evolved (Graesch et al., 2020), or how data-driven marketing has expanded the scope and role of marketing (Shah & Murthi, 2021). There have also been studies related to the work of marketing, such as how data and coding analytics are affecting the organization of marketing, market research and advertising (Beauvisage et al., 2023; Cluley, 2022; Cluley et al., 2020; MacKenzie, 2022), the emergence of the digitalized marketer (Ryan et al., 2023), as well as reports of identity crises among marketing professionals lacking the new digital expertise (Quinn et al., 2016). Given the scale, scope and pace of digitalization, we still, despite these contributions, do not know enough about the implications of these evolutions for marketing discipline.

This special issue proposes to examine the digitalization of marketing discipline and its implications. In a context of big tech suffixes – such as MarTech and AdTech – does the discipline know what marketing is, how it is conducted, by whom and with what consequences for both the marketing profession and society at large? We plan to approach these issues from varied disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, ranging from classical marketing to market studies. The dynamics of consumption arise not only from consumers, but from the complex articulation, or mediation, between consumer behaviour, market devices, and the expertise of market professionals (Callon et al., 2007; Cochoy & Mallard, 2018; Cochoy et al., 2017), whether these professionals are trained marketers or not. Consequently, understanding the digitization of marketing requires consideration of both external market dynamics and the ‘internal’ production of marketing devices and expertise (Araujo et al., 2010; Cayla & Zwick, 2011).

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• The spread of IT expertise in the marketing field and its implications for marketing expertise and marketing as a profession.
• The transformation of marketing knowledge induced by the development of digital tools and the implications for marketing as an academic discipline.
• Changing temporalities of marketing (e.g., transition from sequential to synchronous data analysis and marketing - Alemany & Vayre, 2015).
• The impact or non-impact of digital science on consumer markets.
• Epistemological consequences (e.g. mass personalisation, diminishing significance of marketing theories in a context of algorithmic calibration, recommender engines and A/B testing – Callon, 2021; Kotras, 2020; Vargha, 2011).
• Performativity of digital tools and implications for consumers (e.g., shaping of consumer choices – Pellandini-Simányi, 2023; consumer categories of personhood – McFall & Moor, 2018); or as means of ‘manufacturing customers’ – Zwick & Denegri Knott, 2009).
• The promises of digital marketing (e.g., computerized marketing based on promises that primarily serve those who sell them as an example of a “B2B2C” logic, Cochoy et al., 2023).

The full Call for Papers including references can be found at the JMM blog site: https://www.jmmnews.com/digitalization/

Authors should submit manuscripts of between 8,000–10,000 words (excluding tables, references, captions, footnotes and endnotes). All submissions must strictly follow the guidelines for the Journal of Marketing Management. Please note the requirements to include a Summary Statement of Contribution, and to place figures and tables at their correct location within the text. Please also read the following guidelines prior to submitting your manuscript:

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Manuscripts should be submitted online using the T&F Submission Portal for Journal of Marketing Management. Authors should prepare and upload two versions of their manuscript (only use alpha-numeric characters or underscores in the filename). One should be a complete text, while in the second all document information identifying the author should be removed from the files to allow them to be sent anonymously to referees.

When uploading files authors will be able to define the non-anonymous version as “Manuscript - with author details”, and the anonymous version as “Manuscript - Anonymous”. To submit your manuscript to the Special Issue choose “Research Article” from the Manuscript Type list in the Submission Portal. On the next screen (Manuscript Details), answer ‘yes’ to the question ‘Are you submitting your paper for a specific special issue or article collection?’. A drop down menu will then appear and you should select the Special Issue Title from this list.

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