JOURNAL OF MARKETING THEORY AND PRACTICE
2021, VOL. 29, NO. 1, 3–12
https://doi.org/10.1080/10696679.2020.1860679
New areas of research in marketing strategy, consumer behavior, and marketing
analytics: the future is bright
Jagdish Sheth
Charles H. Kellstadt Professor of Marketing, Goizueta Business School, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
ABSTRACT
In the last fifty years, marketing theory and practice has made significant advances toward becom
ing more scientific and rigorous. This paper reviews significant past developments in marketing
strategy, consumer behavior, and marketing analytics. The second half of the paper articulates new
areas of research in marketing strategy, consumer behavior, and marketing analytics. In the past,
techniques were in search of data; in the future data will be in search of techniques including video
analytics.
Introduction
The purpose of this paper is to catalog past achievements
of marketing practice and theory and suggest new areas
of research in the decade of the twenties. The past has
been bright and the future looks even brighter.
Marketing as a discipline (definition, description, and
explanation) is about a hundred years old. Modern mar
keting practice is about 200-years old. It began with
Thomas Barrett at Pears Soap Company in England.
Barrett invented the techniques of awareness, persuasion
and promotion, and focused on how Pears Soap was
unique (translucent) as compared to other brands of
soaps. This was quickly followed by Unilever in England
and by Procter and Gamble (P&G) in the United States.
Roots of marketing practice go back to trading between
buyers and sellers. Organized trading is about 2500 years
old. It began with the famous Silk Route for exchanging
Chinese silk with western products of various trading
posts or markets supported by local kings and tribes.
Trading was truly international. Because of its roots in
trading, marketing even today is perceived as selling and
buying. Selling is, of course, as old as the civilization.
The evolution of marketing discipline
Marketing discipline was organized around three things:
around channels, which led to the institutional school;
around products which led to the commodity school;
and around functions or activities which is referred to as
the functional school of marketing (Sheth et al., 1988).
CONTACT Jagdish Sheth
GA 30322-1007.
jag@jagsheth.com
© 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
Marketing as a discipline became unified by the
4Ps of marketing (product, price, place, and promo
tion) with a focus on the packaged goods industry
(grocery products, which are consumables as opposed
to durables). The 4Ps of marketing concept was
further reinforced by segmentation, positioning, and
targeting (SPT) as well as by the concept of differ
ential advantage.
American Marketing Association (AMA) was estab
lished in 1936. It provided the definition of marketing
and further unified the discipline. Three decades later,
Marketing Science Institute was established in 1961. It
was a collaboration between the industry (mostly con
sumer goods companies) and the academics to jointly
explore and discover answers to current and future realworld problems. MSI provided seed money to marketing
scholars to conduct research on what is referred to as
“MSI Research Priorities.”
Marketing both as a practice and a discipline grew
enormously in the fifties and sixties. This was partly due
to the post-war boom in demand for branded packaged
goods and the emergence of large regional and national
supermarkets such as A&P and Kroger.
At the same time, growth in demand for durable goods
such as appliances (refrigerators, washing machines, dish
washers) as well as the automobiles added to the evolu
tion of marketing both as a discipline and a practice.
Finally, and probably more importantly, the popularity
of television and its almost universal penetration shifted
advertising and promotion from the print to the broad
cast media and from the local to the national markets.
Charles H. Kellstadt Professor of Marketing, Goizueta Business School, Emory University, 1300 Clifton Rd, Atlanta,
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J. SHETH
Consumers also began to eat out more often with the
growth of franchise-based quick-service restaurants
(QSR), such as McDonald's, KFC, and Pizza Hut.
Each of the four Ps of marketing became more pro
fessional and institutionalized through processes and
systems. For example, product management became
a science as did branding and brand management.
Pricing became more sophisticated and price manage
ment across locations and markets emerged as a science
than as an art. Universal product barcodes standardized
supply chain and product information. Airlines began to
utilize large-scale computers and yield management
became more scientific.
As we will discuss later in the paper, in the quest to
become a science, marketing began to embrace econo
metrics from economics; longitudinal panels from
sociology and political science; behavioral experiments
from psychology; and operations research techniques
from the engineering sciences.
Marketing strategy research expanded into services
marketing and relationship marketing. Economic
growth emerged from the service industries (cell phone
networks, utility services, healthcare, etc.). The focus
shifted from the acquisition of new customers to retain
ing existing customers. Loyalty programs, key account
management, and customer centricity became the new
mantra. The biggest boost in the strategy area came from
the market-orientation perspective (Kohli & Jaworksi,
1990). It became a popular construct and generated
significant empirical research.
In my view, marketing strategy has run its course and
is now struggling with the midlife crisis. Recently, it has
discovered new areas of research such as social media,
emerging markets, and societal marketing. However, it
is still searching for a new paradigm or perspective. One
promising perspective is customer centricity.
New frontiers of research in marketing strategy
The break up phase
Starting in the sixties, marketing began to diverge into
three distinct subdisciplines: Marketing Strategy,
Consumer Behavior, and Marketing Analytics. Each
sub-discipline offered its own courses and their own
textbooks. Finally, each sub-discipline has its own mem
bership associations (AMA, ACR, and INFORMS/ISMS)
with their own academic journals(Journal of Marketing,
Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer
Behavior, and Marketing Science).
The rest of the paper will examine the evolution of
each sub-discipline and suggest future research oppor
tunities. We should take pride in how far the discipline
of marketing has come, especially after the second
World War.
Evolution of marketing strategy
As mentioned before, managerial marketing began to
evolve into marketing strategy. This led to a shift from
consumers to competition soon after the first energy
crisis of 1972–1974. Competition became the focus
because of the collapse of companies, especially in the
airline and trucking industry.
President Carter, under lots of economic pressure,
decided to deregulate the airline and the trucking indus
try. Both industries experienced a great deal of mergers
and acquisitions. Private equity ruled the world and
Warren Buffett became a billionaire. GE’s PIMS data
bases housed at Harvard Business School led to hun
dreds of papers on competitive strategy as opposed to
marketing operations (Szymanski et al., 1993).
It appears that marketing strategy will go back to its
roots and focus back on managerial marketing. There
are six new areas of research which look very promising
toward revitalization of marketing strategy. All of them
are anchored to shifting the focus back on customers.
They are:
(1) Creating Value for Customers. A customer is a buyer
and an user. The buyer is looking for service value; a user
is looking for performance value; and a payer is looking
for the price value. In other words, you can always win
customers if you offer a superior product with
a reasonable price in a customer-friendly service (Sheth
& Mittal, 2001).
(2) Brand Value. A second area of research is developing
the intangible asset (or goodwill) through brand value
linked directly to market value of the company. Brands
independent of the products are becoming more and
more real and it is resulting in earning royalties through
licensing the brand. Examples include Disney, HarleyDavidson, and most franchise brands.
(3) Discipline of Selling. While selling is as old as the
civilization, and we have many books on sales manage
ment as well as what makes someone a good sales per
son, there is not as much scientific research on selling.
This is about to change. Selling is gaining respect in
marketing as a field of scientific inquiry. This is likely
to range from behavioral experiments in campus labora
tories to field experiments in cooperation with compa
nies such as Salesfroce.com, to key account performance
and impact of influencer marketing in social media.
JOURNAL OF MARKETING THEORY AND PRACTICE
Selling as a persuasion process can also learn from
several disciplines in behavioral sciences, public opi
nion, and political sciences. The latest research on nud
ging by Thaler and Sustein (2008) is a good example of
this new research. What we need is a comprehensive
model of selling as a process similar to the model of
buyer behavior (Howard & Sheth, 1969; Sheth, 2020a).
(4) Science of Pricing. As mentioned before, industry
leads in pricing research. It has resulted in concepts of
psychological pricing; price deals (two for one, for exam
ple); and dynamic pricing in many services such as the
airlines and the ridesharing services. Pricing in practice
also includes financing and leasing for capital goods in
industrial markets and durable goods in consumer mar
kets in industrial markets. In the academic research,
pricing has been anchored to economic theories of
price elasticity (willingness to pay and ability to pay),
and price as on entry barrier for customers to make
a purchase. More recently, pricing has been a focus of
research in behavioral economics including research on
risk-taking and price–quality relationships (Kahneman
& Tversky, 2000; Kahneman et al., 1982).
Kent Monroe has been a pioneer in marketing on
pricing research using Weber’s concept of just notice
able difference (JND) in perception (Monroe, 2003).
However, more exciting research in pricing is possible
today in the world of digital marketing and social media.
Fundamentally, price is looked upon as an inhibitor in
between intention and purchase. Price as an indicator of
quality is another major area of research. Finally, it is
possible to do macro research at a nation level to mea
sure the price image of nations. For example, China is
perceived as a cheap goods manufacturer as were Japan
and South Korea at one time. An index of price-based
ranking of nations anchored to quality and performance
is a great opportunity of research at a macro level.
(5) Reverse Marketing. Reverse marketing was coined by
Leenders and Blenkhorn (1989), Blenkhorn and Banting
(1991), and Plank and Francis (2001) nearly two decades
ago, specifically for B to B marketing. It is also referred
to as demand-driven making (manufacturing) as
opposed to making the product, storing it in the ware
house, displaying at the retail outlet, and waiting for
customers to shop and buy it. Today, with growing
online procurement and shopping on Amazon,
AliBaba and Flipkart as well as online sites of all major
brick and mortar retailers (Macy’s, J.C. Penney, Target),
the process of buying is reversed. The order is placed
and paid for first and the product or service (airline
tickets, concerts, etc.) is delivered at home, office, or
the factory. In fact, most B to B procurement today is
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online. This means marketing and supply chain need to
be integrated and hopefully in real time (Sheth et al.,
2009).
Reverse marketing is another instance where market
ing practice is leading the theory. For example, is reverse
marketing contextual or universal? What are the side
effects, such as stock out or return of merchandise?
Should companies integrate supply chain into the mar
keting function? What outcomes (cycle time, cost reduc
tion, productivity gain, revenue growth or cross-selling)
are useful to measure for in reverse marketing’s effi
ciency and effectiveness? Finally, what impact reverse
marketing is likely to have on advertising, promotion,
and salesmanship?
(6) Role of Marketing in Society. Interdependence
between marketing and society is the heart of research
in macro marketing including the impact of public pol
icy on consumption (demand) and on production (sup
ply). Examples include demarketing of harmful products
such as cigarette smoking and alcohol consumption by
public policy and regulations. Indeed, most industries
are regulated with respect to product safety, product
disclosure, product labeling, and truth in advertising
and lending laws. Marketing, also on the other side,
has an enormous impact on society through social and
celebrity-led aspirations as well as peer group influences.
Marketing can and does enhance consumers’ willingness
to pay even in segments of the society where there is no
ability to pay. It is interesting to note that in consumer
markets both the low income and the high-income seg
ments, consumers prefer and actually buy premium
brands while the middle class buys and consumes
value brands.
Impact of marketing in encouraging overconsump
tion is another area of serious concern especially with
respect to obesity and the environment. Social critics
often blame marketing for climate change and sustain
ability (plastic bottles and packaging materials). Often
market failures are attributed to bad marketing. This has
resulted in reviving research on the role of marketing in
society, Can marketing be a force for a better world?
What is the role of the chief marketing officer (CMO) in
a company? Does marketing have a role in creating value
for all stakeholders including the community and the
planet in addition to delivering revenue growth and
profitability for investors?
Social activism with respect to climate change and
the environment is not only growing worldwide but it
is also led by the next generation of young adults. The
most obvious example is the popularity of Greta
Thunberg, a teenager from Sweden, who is invited on
the world stage and challenge the business and
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J. SHETH
government leaders about their lack of commitment to
climate change.
Similarly, the United Nations has established the
new millennium’s goals of triple bottom line (profit,
people, planet) and is strongly urging both business
leaders and policymakers to embrace the goals and
advocate them to the masses and the markets. In my
view, marketing strategy is likely to revert to manage
rial marketing. In the process, it will focus more on
customers and community and the planet and less on
competition.
Evolution of consumer behavior
As mentioned before, Consumer Behavior (CB) as
a discipline is only 50 years old. Just as marketing began
to separate itself from economics (with focus on channels
of distribution), consumer behavior began to separate itself
from market research. The biggest change took place when
CB borrowed both explanations as well as research meth
ods of behavioral sciences (social and clinical psychology).
George Katona’s classic paper (1951) on the distinction
between the rational consumer advocated in economics
versus the behavioral consumer observed in psychology
became key to the start of CB as a stand-alone discipline.
It was referred to as economic psychology. This was further
led by several behavioral scientists including Herbert
Simon 1956 (Satisficing vs Maximization), Leon Festinger
1959 (Cognitive Dissonance), and Raymond Bauer 1960
(Risk Reduction).
However, it was the publication of the Howard–Sheth
Theory of Buyer Behavior (1969) which catapulted CB as
a separate disciple. This was followed by separate courses
in CB with a popular textbook by Engel et al. (1968). It was
further cemented by the establishment of the Association of
Consumer Research (ACR) and later on by its top tier
journal, Journal of Consumer Research (JCR).
Consumer behavior has evolved overtime. I have iden
tified several stages of its evolution. It began with a focus
on motivation research anchored to Freudian psychology
to explain nonrational or abnormal behavior of the con
sumers. Motivation research was popularized by Ernest
Dichter (2009). However, it was quickly taken over by
social psychology and its multi-attribute attitude models.
In other words, consumers develop predispositions and
intentions based on past experiences as well as information
provided by marketers, friends, and reference groups.
A number of models of attitude formation were advo
cated including what is referred to as the disjunctive,
conjunctive, lexicographic, and linear additive attri
butes. This multi-attribute attitude model culminated
in the use of Fishbein and Azjan (1975) model of rea
soned actions.
Multi-Attribute models led to information proces
sing. In other words, how do consumers process infor
mation about brands and products? It led to focus on
perception and memory. It also generated interest in
information overload (Jacoby et al., 1974) active search
for product or brand information and perceptual bias
(Howard & Sheth, 1969). Information processing also
shifted research methods from field surveys to labora
tory experiments in an effort to establish cause and effect
relationship between the outcome and the marketing
stimuli such as an advertisement. Information proces
sing also focused on several biometric and physiological
measures such as galvanic skin pressure, tachistoscope,
and pupil dilation. The underlying objective was to
make it more objective by observing actual behavior as
a reaction to the advertisement.
In the eighties, CB began to shift away from the
laboratory to the real world. Anchored to anthropology
and sociology, CB scholars began what is referred to as
“odyssey research” in which the researcher is deeply
immersed in the field as an observer of how people
consume products and services. Rusell Belk (2014), led
the way by organizing the field studies. The main mis
sion of odyssey research was not to rely on any prior
perspective with a priori hypotheses but to just observe,
codify, and validate the observations. The hope was to
develop a theory in use about how consumers behave
without any explanation of why they behave the way
they do. Unfortunately, several early pioneers of odyssey
research moved on to other research interests.
Consequently, it did not realize its full potential.
In the meanwhile, economics began to embrace the
behavioral aspects of consumption soon after Herbert
Simon received the Nobel Prize in economics even
though he was not an economist. This was followed by
Kahneman and more recently Richard Thaler.
Behavioral economics became the new buzzword in
economics. Economics began to accept the laboratory
methods and the behavioral concepts and theories. In
marketing, several scholars such as Robert Hallaway and
Sheth and Venkatesan (1968) carried out similar
research nearly 50 years ago.
Today, CB is expanding the scope of research into
areas which were neglected in the past. These include
low-income consumers and poverty reduction. This is
referred to as transformative consumer research (TCR).
It also includes study of the art, music, theater, and films.
New frontiers of research in consumer behavior
In my view, the biggest new frontiers of research in CB
will be user experiences. This is mostly due to the spec
tacular growth of social media such as Facebook,
JOURNAL OF MARKETING THEORY AND PRACTICE
WhatsApp, Instagram and Twitter, as well as Weibo and
WeChat (Sheth, 2020b). Social media and ecommerce
are generating large data for research which is unprece
dented. Furthermore, social media are borderless beca
sue of their global reach. The largest nations today are
not China and India but Facebook and WhatsApp, each
has more than two billion subscribers. Every political
leader today has a Twitter handle and some of them have
as many as 50 million followers. The same is true of
celebrities from the entertainment and the sports fields.
Today, influencer marketing expenditures have
exceeded 6 USD billion dollars and the largest consu
mers of social media are China, Japan, and South Korea.
Below are seven areas of new frontiers of research.
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only way to cope with the tsunami of consumption. It
also makes sense because more than 70% of the carbon
footprint comes from the consumer sector and more
specifically from the home and the automobile.
Consumption also impacts water and vegetation. In
addition to the three R’s of mindful consumption
(Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle) it is very likely that differ
ent nations will enact and enforce laws which restrict
consumption as well as offer incentives and disincen
tives for mindful consumption. Conscious consumption
is an excellent area of future research especially if it is
linked to the triple bottom line (people, planet, and
profit).
3. Shared Consumption
1. Focus on User Experiences
The biggest shift in marketing and especially in con
sumer behavior is the shift from the buyer to the user.
Today, what matters most is consumer experience and
engagement. The focus is on post purchase comments
and reviews. The old word of mouth (WoM) which was
predominantly local (neighborhoods) has become glo
bal. Online WoM is no longer limited to people known
as friends and family. Today anyone in the world with
experience can be a source of information and influence.
As CB shifts from the buyer to the user, it is inevitable
that research techniques and protocols will also change.
It will require learning how to use natural language
processing (NLP) to organize and analyze text data.
What was the old qualitative research in the days of
motivation research will become more sophisticated
and scientific. Since Facebook and Instagram data are
available everywhere (also from WeChat and Weibo)
one would expect scholars from all over the world
including the emerging markets will undertake research
and publish in top academic journals. In short, the
democratization of scholarship in CB is inevitable. It
will help the discipline to have cross-cultural perspec
tives and contexts.
There is an increasing worldwide trend for sharing
such as ridesharing (Uber and Lyft), room sharing
(Airbnb), furniture sharing, as well as garment sharing.
This seems especially true among the well-educated
millennial generation in urban areas where they don’t
have enough cash flow to own real assets such as homes
and cars.
Sharing consumption is a new phenomenon. While it
can be explained by the traditional economic theories of
ability vs willingness to pay or propensity to consume vs
propensity to save, I believe it may also benefit from new
perspectives anchored to societal changes in what con
sumers do today versus a century ago. It may also
require to think through the side effects of ownership
including the stress and the loss of property due to
externalities such as hurricanes and earthquakes. At
a macro-level, it will be interesting to analyze the future
of capitalism which is anchored to ownership of material
possessions such as homes, cars, and appliances. Are
consumers becoming less materialistic? Russell Belk
(1988) in a seminal paper had provided an excellent
framework about material possessions as reflections of
the self and the extended self. As society shifts from
kinship to friendship for social interactions, materialism
may get redefined altogether.
2. Mindful Consumption
4. Cross-Cultural Consumption
As stated before, both public policy and business enter
prises are coming to the same conclusion that sustain
ability is a key strategic issue of the twenty-first century.
With the rise of the brand-conscious middle class in large
emerging markets such as China, India, and now Africa,
there is a strong consensus that planet earth cannot renew
and reproduce fast enough to sustain modern consump
tion (Apte & Sheth, 2017). One solution is mindful con
sumption. In other words, informing, educating, and
enforcing laws and regulations on consumption is the
Another area of consumer research is cross-cultural
differences in consumption of basic needs such as food,
clothing, and shelter. Interest in cross-cultural con
sumption is growing for two reasons. First, since the
liberalization of trade and creation of economic regional
trade blocks such as USMCA (NAFTA) and regional
integration such as the European Union, product and
people mobility has been increasing between nations.
Consequently, in most parts of the world, there are
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J. SHETH
more cross-cultural differences within the country as
much as or more than between the countries. The best
representation is the United States where cultural diver
sity has grown significantly over time. In California,
Texas, and Florida, the majority are the minorities col
lectively. Social media and ecommerce have provided
access to foreign products and services which has
resulted in more diversity of consumption within each
nation. This has led to fusion in music, concerts, foods,
clothing, and films.
Finally, Sheth (2017) in his book Genes, Climate, and
Consumption Culture has documented that most cul
tural differences can be explained by the migration and
adaptation of genes to local climate (arctic, temperate,
and tropical) for sourcing calories, protein, and fat in
foods and local sourcing of materials such as wool,
leather, and cotton for garments and wood, stone, and
clay for homes. The North-South axis not only explains
differences in food, shelter, and clothing but also differ
ences in cultural traits such as punctuality, friendship,
and uncertainty avoidance.
5. Low-Income Consumers
A growing area of interest in consumer behavior is
the low-income consumers, defined as those who earn
less than two dollars a day in income. The interest in
low-income consumers began with C. K. Prahalad and
his seminal book, The Fortune at the Bottom of the
Pyramid (2005). It advocated that there is a great market
opportunity if the marketer can make the product or the
service more affordable and accessible.
It is estimated that low-income consumer market is
at least 5 USD trillion annually and growing faster
than the global GDP. It is also highly concentrated in
Africa and South Asia. With the cell phone revolution
in both continents, access has become more possible
through eCommerce and market exchanges along with
online payment systems such as Paytm in India and
Mpesa in Kenya. In other words, what is local, unor
ganized and unbranded consumption is transformed
into branded and organized. This is especially true for
cell phones, television, and other consumer electro
nics. It is becoming increasingly true for garments and
personal care products such as toothpaste, soaps, and
shampoos.
6. Consumption of Free Goods
Another growing but neglected area is consumption
of “free” goods. They are free in the sense that the user
does not pay for the product or the service when making
a purchase or using it. There are three types of “free”
goods. The first and the most obvious are social media
and search engines. Facebook, Weibo, WeChat,
WhatsApp, Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, and Google
are obvious examples. However, there are also millions
of free apps on everything ranging from dating sites to
entertainment and news. In all these cases, the user does
not pay and the marketer has to figure who will pay such
as advertisers and the investors.
The second category of “free” goods are parks and
recreation places; museums and public libraries; and of
course highways and freeways. The size of the free goods
market is not documented but it will be safe to assume
that globally it may exceed trillions of dollars.
The third category of “free” goods are products and
services that are subsidized by the governments and the
world organizations. These include school meals, public
transit, non-thermal energy (solar, wind, electric) water,
and other municipal services.
Since price is not the regulator of demand, it will be
replaced by time as a scarce resource. Time is
a perishable asset unlike money. Also, most of the
“free” goods are services which also cannot be stored.
Finally, time constraint may result in more peaks and
valleys (weekend vs weekdays and evening vs day time)
in demand of free goods.
7. Digital First
The seventh and probably the biggest new frontier of
research in CB will be the permanent shift from the
physical first to digital first. Consumers will use their
cellphones and laptops first for information, recommen
dations, new uses of existing products and services, and
learn the use of new products and services. This has
enormous implications for shopping malls and brick
and mortar retail stores. Just as farmers' markets and
flea markets were replaced by grocery stores and shop
ping centers, we will see both of them replaced by
information malls and market place exchanges. What
was peripheral will become core and what is core will
become peripheral. This has happened before when
print media conceded to broadcast media which are
now displaced by social media.
There are several interesting observations and impli
cations of this transformation. First, this is truly
a global phenomenon, whether it is China, India,
Europe, or America. Since massive data are available
in the public domain, access to data will no longer be
a “data divide” between the advanced and the emerging
market scholars. Second, discontinuity of generations
and succession of family values will make the consumer
more dependent on influencers and peer groups across
the globe.
JOURNAL OF MARKETING THEORY AND PRACTICE
Finally, and most importantly, family or households
as a consumption unit will be displaced by the individual
as the unit of analysis, and understanding, and influence.
If the last half-century was exciting in consumer
behavior, the next half-century will be even more
exciting for research. Equally important, scholarship
in consumer behavior will be more democratized and
equalized between the United States and Europe and
between advanced economies and the emerging mar
kets. Finally, CB will become more mainstream in
behavioral and social sciences including psychology,
economics, sociology, and anthropology. This will
lead to further separation of consumer behavior from
marketing.
Evolution of marketing science
The roots of today’s marketing analytics go back to the
late fifties and early sixties when several market
research companies offered their household panel
data for academic research. Just as PIMs database and
Porter’s competitive strategy framework shifted the
marketing discipline from descriptive to predictive
science, these longitudinal panels with actual buying
behavior (as reported by panel members) shifted mar
keting research from opinions and preferences to ana
lyzing real buying behavior at a brand level. This was
further augmented by Paul Samuelson’s advocacy for
“Revealed Preferences” as a basis for data analysis with
the use of econometrics Marketing was also criticized
as a “feely touchy” science with weak measures. It
needed to become more scientific. There were numer
ous debates and discussions whether marketing is
(or should be) an art or a science. At the same time,
operations research techniques such as linear program
ming, queing theory, game theory, and stochastic mod
els became accessible through software platforms such
as BIOMED, SPSS, and SAS. Large-scale data analysis
became feasible albeit expensive and slow in the legacy
era of mainframe computers.Several scholars in quan
titative marketing including Alfred Kuehn, Robert
Buzzel, Frank Bass, Michael Pessemier, William
Massey (and his students), David Montgomery and
Don Morrison, and John D.C. Little and his MIT col
leagues became dominant scholars in marketing’s evo
lution as a science (Winer & Neslin, 2014).
This was a golden era of operation research across all
disciplines of business including marketing. New jour
nals such as Operations Research Quarterly and
Management Science became dominant academic jour
nals for quantitative papers. In marketing, there was also
the birth of the Journal of Marketing Research (JMR)
published by the American Marketing Association.
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In the 1970s and all through the 1990s, operations
research techniques began to give way to multivariate
methods (Sheth, 1977) such as factor analysis and dis
criminant analysis. These were further augmented by
conjoint analysis, multidimensional scaling (MDS),
and cluster analysis.
Paul Green at the Wharton School and several of his
former students notably Vithala Rao evangelized con
joint analysis and multidimensional scaling. Marketing
discipline and market research began to shift from
econometrics to psychometrics. This ultimately culmi
nated in the use of structural equation modeling and
LISREL as a comprehensive method to model cause and
effect. Richard Bagozzi became a strong proponent of
LISREL as an overarching conceptual as well as
a quantitative method for research in marketing.
In parallel, motivation research anchored to focused
groups, in-depth interviews, and projective techniques
began to embrace more physiological measures such as
pupil dilation, tachistoscope, and more recently, brain
imaging. Just as operations research shifted analyzing
and understanding consumer preferences to actual buy
ing behavior, biometrics shifted consumer’s verbal
responses to physiological measures. Unfortunately,
due to high cost and long cycle time, biometrics did
not become mainstream in marketing science. It faded
away in history and may be rediscovered sometime in
the future.
Since the late nineties, there has been resurgence of
marketing models anchored to economics and choice
models. Most of the research is large-scale empirical
research on scanner data. Equally popular has been the
use of customer lifetime value (CLV) analysis following
theory development anchored to relationship marketing
and loyalty programs. The best-known scholars include
V. Kumar, Peter Fader, Scott Neslin, Fred Feinberger,
and Werner Reinhartz. The formation of ISMS and its
research journal, Marketing Science enabled this shift to
empirical research and marketing models.
More recently, there has been a significant shift
toward research on big data (non-numerical data such
as text messages) on social media using natural language
processing (NLP). A special focus has been the impact of
online word of mouth (WoM) influence of users and
influencers. Social media is now becoming advertising
media with user-generated content surpassing marketer
content. For example, YouTube adds millions of userproduced videos each day. Video is now also a reality on
Facebook and WhatsApp. Research on non-numerical
data (qualitative data) has also changed the vocabulary
from marketing models to marketing analytics. In the
process, marketing science is less anchored to any one
theory. Instead, it is becoming a discovery science.
10
J. SHETH
The sheer magnitude of big data and its inherent
diversity (text, numbers, emoji, video) are making tradi
tional techniques obsolete. In the past, techniques such
as Markov chains and linear programming were in
search of data. In the future, data will be in search of
techniques, most of it not invented yet.
New frontiers of research in marketing analytics
There are at least six new frontiers of research in market
ing analytics.
1. Text Mining
The most obvious and the growing field is text
mining with the use of natural language processing
(NLP). NLP is becoming a more mature technique
and it is converging toward an agreed-upon methodol
ogy of transforming text and other non-numerical data
into quantifiable data suitable for statistical analysis
and inference. The potential in text mining is enor
mous, ranging from user experiences on a brand, pro
duct, or service to spread of false news and brand
rumors. Another major area of text mining is a crosscultural comparison on user-generated content and
product or service experiences. This is especially useful
for large global enterprises such as Starbucks,
McDonald’s, Walmart, and Amazon. The third area
of growing research based on text mining is crisis
management. How do you cope with such black swan
(Taleb, 2007) events such as the coronavirus? Finally,
social media and especially Twitter data are becoming
mainstream for research in political marketing.
major social media platform. While we know the art and
science of video editing from the entertainment (movies
and television) industries, we have no clue how to ana
lyze video content.
Video content is also exploding with online learning
through MOOCs such as Courseara and Edex as well as
holding remote conferences and classrooms as we are
experiencing now due to the coronavirus (Covid-19)
pandemic. Platforms such as Zoom and Facetime are
becoming mainstream. Finally, the cost of digital storage
is very low. It is almost free as compared to storage of
print documents. What we need is syndicated services
such as A.C. Nielsen panel of television viewing so that
the methodology and representations are standardized
for analysis and prediction.
4. Imaging Research
As mentioned before, while biometrics is out of favor
in marketing analytics, there is still an interest in brain
research (brain scanning). Brain research is becoming
a more mature science and fMRI is becoming more
mainstream. At the same time, facial recognition tech
niques are becoming a reality, especially in homeland
security. As communities install more cameras and
other surveillance devices and as personal devices such
as cellphones can be accessed by facial recognition.
There will be a growing interest in retailing and other
location-based services. The movie, Minority Report,
articulated how facial recognition can be used in shop
ping as well as in homeland security. Again data will be
in search of techniques.
5. Fuzzy Logic
2. Emoji Analytics
Emojis have grown significantly as a part of large
messy data. We have not yet discovered or invented
a technique to analyze and provide consumer insights
anchored to emojis. The number of emojis has grown
exponentially in recent years. While one can use our
knowledge of ideography, we are still at an infancy
stage in the analysis of emoji data. Fortunately, unlike
the text data, emojis are well defined and there is
a dictionary of meanings for each emoji. This should
enable scholars to analyze the data and discover the
emotive dimensions in user-generated content.
3. Video Analytics
Probably the biggest wave of information on the
worldwide web and social media will be the video con
tent. This is led by YouTube today but it will be on every
It is surprising to note that fuzzy logic developed in
mathematics more than 40 years ago is still not used as
a technique in marketing. Fuzzy logic is pattern recogni
tion with partial or insufficient information about an
object or an incident. It is a technique embedded in
cell phones and in many manufacturing industries. It is
often embedded as a chip in most imaging devices.
Fuzzy logic seems very useful in facial recognition and
personal identification.
6. Forensic Research
Probably the most exciting field of research in mar
keting analytics is forensic research. Despite prior mar
ket tests, new product failures are still very high.
Similarly, most advertising campaigns do not generate
incremental revenue as forecasted despite prior pretests
and consumer feedback. In order to improve the science
JOURNAL OF MARKETING THEORY AND PRACTICE
of marketing, it is maybe more important to analyze and
identify why some products flourish and others fizzle.
This is especially important in emerging markets, where
many multinationals fail for the same product or service
they are successful in advanced countries (Immelt et al.,
2009). Forensic research is a well-established science in
criminal investigations. It is becoming more and more
common in accounting to investigate fraud and embez
zlement. It is conspicuously absent in marketing analy
tics despite the availability of historical data.
As mentioned before, fifty years ago when marketing
science emerged as a special field of research, the tech
niques were in search of data. In the future, data will be
in search of techniques. Hopefully, scholars in market
ing analytics will invent or develop new techniques to
analyze these new types of data.
Drivers of convergence
As mentioned before, over the last fifty years, market
ing discipline has diverged into three subdisciplines:
marketing strategy, consumer behavior, and marketing
analytics. Each has its own academic associations, jour
nals, and courses. In both marketing management and
consumer behavior, there are standard textbooks.
Marketing analytics is still subsumed under market
research. It is, however, a matter of time before a standalone textbook for marketing analytics will be pub
lished, especially in light of offering specialized
Master’s Degree programs in marketing analytics.
After 50 years, it seems that there are four external
drivers (forces) which may drive more convergence
among the three sub-disciplines. The first is social
media and the user-generated content. Each discipline
now analyzes data from social media for managerial,
methodological, and consumer insights, respectively.
A second external force-driving convergence is the
growth of emerging markets. Emerging markets are
transforming from the traditional societies anchored to
the agricultural age into more contemporary societies as
they transition the agriculture sector to the manufactur
ing sector (China) or the services sector (India). This has
led to the rise of a brand-conscious middle class. The
traditional unorganized channels of distribution offering
unbranded products and services are replaced by
branded products and services and offered by organized
retailing. Examples include Walmart in India, China,
and Mexico, Alibaba in China, and Flipkart and
Amazon in India. Each sub-discipline of marketing
(managerial, analytics, and CB) is all doing research on
emerging marketing.
The third external force is the rise of corporate
social responsibility (CSR) on a worldwide basis with
11
a focus on environmental sustainability and climate
change. Once again, scholars in each of the three subdisciplines are doing research on CSR and public pol
icy. Finally, automation of consumption is now
a reality. At the start of the industrial age, there was
the automation of production. This was followed by
automation of distribution, which was in turn fol
lowed by automation of commerce culminating today
into full-blown ecommerce and electronic market
exchanges. This is now migrating to automation of
consumption including the use of artificial intelli
gence, machine learning, and virtual reality. For exam
ple, today it is possible to have a robot as a companion
at home and virtual robots becoming personal digital
assistants (PDA) to carry out most of the daily chores.
Alexa and Siri are emerging as voice-activated routi
nization of daily chores from the time a consumer
wakes up to the time he or she goes to sleep. This
automation of consumption will encourage each of the
three sub-disciplines of marketing to explore the
fundamental shift from the consumer going to the
market to the market coming to the consumer’s
home or office.
Concluding remarks
The state of marketing has been bright in the last fifty
years as marketing began the transition from
a descriptive to a predictive science. The divergence of
marketing into separate subdisciplines of consumer
behavior and marketing analytics has encouraged more
scholars from other disciplines to focus on marketing.
The future of marketing in the next 50 years will be even
brighter in each of the three sub-disciplines. I admire the
younger scholars and wish them well in ensuring that
marketing is well respected by other disciplines as well as
the society at large. Indeed as a discipline, marketing will
be even more exciting in the future.
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JOURNAL OF MARKETING THEORY AND PRACTICE
2021, VOL. 29, NO. 1, 3–12
https://doi.org/10.1080/10696679.2020.1860679
New areas of research in marketing strategy, consumer behavior, and marketing
analytics: the future is bright
Jagdish Sheth
Charles H. Kellstadt Professor of Marketing, Goizueta Business School, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
ABSTRACT
In the last fifty years, marketing theory and practice has made significant advances toward becom
ing more scientific and rigorous. This paper reviews significant past developments in marketing
strategy, consumer behavior, and marketing analytics. The second half of the paper articulates new
areas of research in marketing strategy, consumer behavior, and marketing analytics. In the past,
techniques were in search of data; in the future data will be in search of techniques including video
analytics.
Introduction
The purpose of this paper is to catalog past achievements
of marketing practice and theory and suggest new areas
of research in the decade of the twenties. The past has
been bright and the future looks even brighter.
Marketing as a discipline (definition, description, and
explanation) is about a hundred years old. Modern mar
keting practice is about 200-years old. It began with
Thomas Barrett at Pears Soap Company in England.
Barrett invented the techniques of awareness, persuasion
and promotion, and focused on how Pears Soap was
unique (translucent) as compared to other brands of
soaps. This was quickly followed by Unilever in England
and by Procter and Gamble (P&G) in the United States.
Roots of marketing practice go back to trading between
buyers and sellers. Organized trading is about 2500 years
old. It began with the famous Silk Route for exchanging
Chinese silk with western products of various trading
posts or markets supported by local kings and tribes.
Trading was truly international. Because of its roots in
trading, marketing even today is perceived as selling and
buying. Selling is, of course, as old as the civilization.
The evolution of marketing discipline
Marketing discipline was organized around three things:
around channels, which led to the institutional school;
around products which led to the commodity school;
and around functions or activities which is referred to as
the functional school of marketing (Sheth et al., 1988).
CONTACT Jagdish Sheth
GA 30322-1007.
jag@jagsheth.com
© 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
Marketing as a discipline became unified by the
4Ps of marketing (product, price, place, and promo
tion) with a focus on the packaged goods industry
(grocery products, which are consumables as opposed
to durables). The 4Ps of marketing concept was
further reinforced by segmentation, positioning, and
targeting (SPT) as well as by the concept of differ
ential advantage.
American Marketing Association (AMA) was estab
lished in 1936. It provided the definition of marketing
and further unified the discipline. Three decades later,
Marketing Science Institute was established in 1961. It
was a collaboration between the industry (mostly con
sumer goods companies) and the academics to jointly
explore and discover answers to current and future realworld problems. MSI provided seed money to marketing
scholars to conduct research on what is referred to as
“MSI Research Priorities.”
Marketing both as a practice and a discipline grew
enormously in the fifties and sixties. This was partly due
to the post-war boom in demand for branded packaged
goods and the emergence of large regional and national
supermarkets such as A&P and Kroger.
At the same time, growth in demand for durable goods
such as appliances (refrigerators, washing machines, dish
washers) as well as the automobiles added to the evolu
tion of marketing both as a discipline and a practice.
Finally, and probably more importantly, the popularity
of television and its almost universal penetration shifted
advertising and promotion from the print to the broad
cast media and from the local to the national markets.
Charles H. Kellstadt Professor of Marketing, Goizueta Business School, Emory University, 1300 Clifton Rd, Atlanta,
4
J. SHETH
Consumers also began to eat out more often with the
growth of franchise-based quick-service restaurants
(QSR), such as McDonald's, KFC, and Pizza Hut.
Each of the four Ps of marketing became more pro
fessional and institutionalized through processes and
systems. For example, product management became
a science as did branding and brand management.
Pricing became more sophisticated and price manage
ment across locations and markets emerged as a science
than as an art. Universal product barcodes standardized
supply chain and product information. Airlines began to
utilize large-scale computers and yield management
became more scientific.
As we will discuss later in the paper, in the quest to
become a science, marketing began to embrace econo
metrics from economics; longitudinal panels from
sociology and political science; behavioral experiments
from psychology; and operations research techniques
from the engineering sciences.
Marketing strategy research expanded into services
marketing and relationship marketing. Economic
growth emerged from the service industries (cell phone
networks, utility services, healthcare, etc.). The focus
shifted from the acquisition of new customers to retain
ing existing customers. Loyalty programs, key account
management, and customer centricity became the new
mantra. The biggest boost in the strategy area came from
the market-orientation perspective (Kohli & Jaworksi,
1990). It became a popular construct and generated
significant empirical research.
In my view, marketing strategy has run its course and
is now struggling with the midlife crisis. Recently, it has
discovered new areas of research such as social media,
emerging markets, and societal marketing. However, it
is still searching for a new paradigm or perspective. One
promising perspective is customer centricity.
New frontiers of research in marketing strategy
The break up phase
Starting in the sixties, marketing began to diverge into
three distinct subdisciplines: Marketing Strategy,
Consumer Behavior, and Marketing Analytics. Each
sub-discipline offered its own courses and their own
textbooks. Finally, each sub-discipline has its own mem
bership associations (AMA, ACR, and INFORMS/ISMS)
with their own academic journals(Journal of Marketing,
Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer
Behavior, and Marketing Science).
The rest of the paper will examine the evolution of
each sub-discipline and suggest future research oppor
tunities. We should take pride in how far the discipline
of marketing has come, especially after the second
World War.
Evolution of marketing strategy
As mentioned before, managerial marketing began to
evolve into marketing strategy. This led to a shift from
consumers to competition soon after the first energy
crisis of 1972–1974. Competition became the focus
because of the collapse of companies, especially in the
airline and trucking industry.
President Carter, under lots of economic pressure,
decided to deregulate the airline and the trucking indus
try. Both industries experienced a great deal of mergers
and acquisitions. Private equity ruled the world and
Warren Buffett became a billionaire. GE’s PIMS data
bases housed at Harvard Business School led to hun
dreds of papers on competitive strategy as opposed to
marketing operations (Szymanski et al., 1993).
It appears that marketing strategy will go back to its
roots and focus back on managerial marketing. There
are six new areas of research which look very promising
toward revitalization of marketing strategy. All of them
are anchored to shifting the focus back on customers.
They are:
(1) Creating Value for Customers. A customer is a buyer
and an user. The buyer is looking for service value; a user
is looking for performance value; and a payer is looking
for the price value. In other words, you can always win
customers if you offer a superior product with
a reasonable price in a customer-friendly service (Sheth
& Mittal, 2001).
(2) Brand Value. A second area of research is developing
the intangible asset (or goodwill) through brand value
linked directly to market value of the company. Brands
independent of the products are becoming more and
more real and it is resulting in earning royalties through
licensing the brand. Examples include Disney, HarleyDavidson, and most franchise brands.
(3) Discipline of Selling. While selling is as old as the
civilization, and we have many books on sales manage
ment as well as what makes someone a good sales per
son, there is not as much scientific research on selling.
This is about to change. Selling is gaining respect in
marketing as a field of scientific inquiry. This is likely
to range from behavioral experiments in campus labora
tories to field experiments in cooperation with compa
nies such as Salesfroce.com, to key account performance
and impact of influencer marketing in social media.
JOURNAL OF MARKETING THEORY AND PRACTICE
Selling as a persuasion process can also learn from
several disciplines in behavioral sciences, public opi
nion, and political sciences. The latest research on nud
ging by Thaler and Sustein (2008) is a good example of
this new research. What we need is a comprehensive
model of selling as a process similar to the model of
buyer behavior (Howard & Sheth, 1969; Sheth, 2020a).
(4) Science of Pricing. As mentioned before, industry
leads in pricing research. It has resulted in concepts of
psychological pricing; price deals (two for one, for exam
ple); and dynamic pricing in many services such as the
airlines and the ridesharing services. Pricing in practice
also includes financing and leasing for capital goods in
industrial markets and durable goods in consumer mar
kets in industrial markets. In the academic research,
pricing has been anchored to economic theories of
price elasticity (willingness to pay and ability to pay),
and price as on entry barrier for customers to make
a purchase. More recently, pricing has been a focus of
research in behavioral economics including research on
risk-taking and price–quality relationships (Kahneman
& Tversky, 2000; Kahneman et al., 1982).
Kent Monroe has been a pioneer in marketing on
pricing research using Weber’s concept of just notice
able difference (JND) in perception (Monroe, 2003).
However, more exciting research in pricing is possible
today in the world of digital marketing and social media.
Fundamentally, price is looked upon as an inhibitor in
between intention and purchase. Price as an indicator of
quality is another major area of research. Finally, it is
possible to do macro research at a nation level to mea
sure the price image of nations. For example, China is
perceived as a cheap goods manufacturer as were Japan
and South Korea at one time. An index of price-based
ranking of nations anchored to quality and performance
is a great opportunity of research at a macro level.
(5) Reverse Marketing. Reverse marketing was coined by
Leenders and Blenkhorn (1989), Blenkhorn and Banting
(1991), and Plank and Francis (2001) nearly two decades
ago, specifically for B to B marketing. It is also referred
to as demand-driven making (manufacturing) as
opposed to making the product, storing it in the ware
house, displaying at the retail outlet, and waiting for
customers to shop and buy it. Today, with growing
online procurement and shopping on Amazon,
AliBaba and Flipkart as well as online sites of all major
brick and mortar retailers (Macy’s, J.C. Penney, Target),
the process of buying is reversed. The order is placed
and paid for first and the product or service (airline
tickets, concerts, etc.) is delivered at home, office, or
the factory. In fact, most B to B procurement today is
5
online. This means marketing and supply chain need to
be integrated and hopefully in real time (Sheth et al.,
2009).
Reverse marketing is another instance where market
ing practice is leading the theory. For example, is reverse
marketing contextual or universal? What are the side
effects, such as stock out or return of merchandise?
Should companies integrate supply chain into the mar
keting function? What outcomes (cycle time, cost reduc
tion, productivity gain, revenue growth or cross-selling)
are useful to measure for in reverse marketing’s effi
ciency and effectiveness? Finally, what impact reverse
marketing is likely to have on advertising, promotion,
and salesmanship?
(6) Role of Marketing in Society. Interdependence
between marketing and society is the heart of research
in macro marketing including the impact of public pol
icy on consumption (demand) and on production (sup
ply). Examples include demarketing of harmful products
such as cigarette smoking and alcohol consumption by
public policy and regulations. Indeed, most industries
are regulated with respect to product safety, product
disclosure, product labeling, and truth in advertising
and lending laws. Marketing, also on the other side,
has an enormous impact on society through social and
celebrity-led aspirations as well as peer group influences.
Marketing can and does enhance consumers’ willingness
to pay even in segments of the society where there is no
ability to pay. It is interesting to note that in consumer
markets both the low income and the high-income seg
ments, consumers prefer and actually buy premium
brands while the middle class buys and consumes
value brands.
Impact of marketing in encouraging overconsump
tion is another area of serious concern especially with
respect to obesity and the environment. Social critics
often blame marketing for climate change and sustain
ability (plastic bottles and packaging materials). Often
market failures are attributed to bad marketing. This has
resulted in reviving research on the role of marketing in
society, Can marketing be a force for a better world?
What is the role of the chief marketing officer (CMO) in
a company? Does marketing have a role in creating value
for all stakeholders including the community and the
planet in addition to delivering revenue growth and
profitability for investors?
Social activism with respect to climate change and
the environment is not only growing worldwide but it
is also led by the next generation of young adults. The
most obvious example is the popularity of Greta
Thunberg, a teenager from Sweden, who is invited on
the world stage and challenge the business and
6
J. SHETH
government leaders about their lack of commitment to
climate change.
Similarly, the United Nations has established the
new millennium’s goals of triple bottom line (profit,
people, planet) and is strongly urging both business
leaders and policymakers to embrace the goals and
advocate them to the masses and the markets. In my
view, marketing strategy is likely to revert to manage
rial marketing. In the process, it will focus more on
customers and community and the planet and less on
competition.
Evolution of consumer behavior
As mentioned before, Consumer Behavior (CB) as
a discipline is only 50 years old. Just as marketing began
to separate itself from economics (with focus on channels
of distribution), consumer behavior began to separate itself
from market research. The biggest change took place when
CB borrowed both explanations as well as research meth
ods of behavioral sciences (social and clinical psychology).
George Katona’s classic paper (1951) on the distinction
between the rational consumer advocated in economics
versus the behavioral consumer observed in psychology
became key to the start of CB as a stand-alone discipline.
It was referred to as economic psychology. This was further
led by several behavioral scientists including Herbert
Simon 1956 (Satisficing vs Maximization), Leon Festinger
1959 (Cognitive Dissonance), and Raymond Bauer 1960
(Risk Reduction).
However, it was the publication of the Howard–Sheth
Theory of Buyer Behavior (1969) which catapulted CB as
a separate disciple. This was followed by separate courses
in CB with a popular textbook by Engel et al. (1968). It was
further cemented by the establishment of the Association of
Consumer Research (ACR) and later on by its top tier
journal, Journal of Consumer Research (JCR).
Consumer behavior has evolved overtime. I have iden
tified several stages of its evolution. It began with a focus
on motivation research anchored to Freudian psychology
to explain nonrational or abnormal behavior of the con
sumers. Motivation research was popularized by Ernest
Dichter (2009). However, it was quickly taken over by
social psychology and its multi-attribute attitude models.
In other words, consumers develop predispositions and
intentions based on past experiences as well as information
provided by marketers, friends, and reference groups.
A number of models of attitude formation were advo
cated including what is referred to as the disjunctive,
conjunctive, lexicographic, and linear additive attri
butes. This multi-attribute attitude model culminated
in the use of Fishbein and Azjan (1975) model of rea
soned actions.
Multi-Attribute models led to information proces
sing. In other words, how do consumers process infor
mation about brands and products? It led to focus on
perception and memory. It also generated interest in
information overload (Jacoby et al., 1974) active search
for product or brand information and perceptual bias
(Howard & Sheth, 1969). Information processing also
shifted research methods from field surveys to labora
tory experiments in an effort to establish cause and effect
relationship between the outcome and the marketing
stimuli such as an advertisement. Information proces
sing also focused on several biometric and physiological
measures such as galvanic skin pressure, tachistoscope,
and pupil dilation. The underlying objective was to
make it more objective by observing actual behavior as
a reaction to the advertisement.
In the eighties, CB began to shift away from the
laboratory to the real world. Anchored to anthropology
and sociology, CB scholars began what is referred to as
“odyssey research” in which the researcher is deeply
immersed in the field as an observer of how people
consume products and services. Rusell Belk (2014), led
the way by organizing the field studies. The main mis
sion of odyssey research was not to rely on any prior
perspective with a priori hypotheses but to just observe,
codify, and validate the observations. The hope was to
develop a theory in use about how consumers behave
without any explanation of why they behave the way
they do. Unfortunately, several early pioneers of odyssey
research moved on to other research interests.
Consequently, it did not realize its full potential.
In the meanwhile, economics began to embrace the
behavioral aspects of consumption soon after Herbert
Simon received the Nobel Prize in economics even
though he was not an economist. This was followed by
Kahneman and more recently Richard Thaler.
Behavioral economics became the new buzzword in
economics. Economics began to accept the laboratory
methods and the behavioral concepts and theories. In
marketing, several scholars such as Robert Hallaway and
Sheth and Venkatesan (1968) carried out similar
research nearly 50 years ago.
Today, CB is expanding the scope of research into
areas which were neglected in the past. These include
low-income consumers and poverty reduction. This is
referred to as transformative consumer research (TCR).
It also includes study of the art, music, theater, and films.
New frontiers of research in consumer behavior
In my view, the biggest new frontiers of research in CB
will be user experiences. This is mostly due to the spec
tacular growth of social media such as Facebook,
JOURNAL OF MARKETING THEORY AND PRACTICE
WhatsApp, Instagram and Twitter, as well as Weibo and
WeChat (Sheth, 2020b). Social media and ecommerce
are generating large data for research which is unprece
dented. Furthermore, social media are borderless beca
sue of their global reach. The largest nations today are
not China and India but Facebook and WhatsApp, each
has more than two billion subscribers. Every political
leader today has a Twitter handle and some of them have
as many as 50 million followers. The same is true of
celebrities from the entertainment and the sports fields.
Today, influencer marketing expenditures have
exceeded 6 USD billion dollars and the largest consu
mers of social media are China, Japan, and South Korea.
Below are seven areas of new frontiers of research.
7
only way to cope with the tsunami of consumption. It
also makes sense because more than 70% of the carbon
footprint comes from the consumer sector and more
specifically from the home and the automobile.
Consumption also impacts water and vegetation. In
addition to the three R’s of mindful consumption
(Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle) it is very likely that differ
ent nations will enact and enforce laws which restrict
consumption as well as offer incentives and disincen
tives for mindful consumption. Conscious consumption
is an excellent area of future research especially if it is
linked to the triple bottom line (people, planet, and
profit).
3. Shared Consumption
1. Focus on User Experiences
The biggest shift in marketing and especially in con
sumer behavior is the shift from the buyer to the user.
Today, what matters most is consumer experience and
engagement. The focus is on post purchase comments
and reviews. The old word of mouth (WoM) which was
predominantly local (neighborhoods) has become glo
bal. Online WoM is no longer limited to people known
as friends and family. Today anyone in the world with
experience can be a source of information and influence.
As CB shifts from the buyer to the user, it is inevitable
that research techniques and protocols will also change.
It will require learning how to use natural language
processing (NLP) to organize and analyze text data.
What was the old qualitative research in the days of
motivation research will become more sophisticated
and scientific. Since Facebook and Instagram data are
available everywhere (also from WeChat and Weibo)
one would expect scholars from all over the world
including the emerging markets will undertake research
and publish in top academic journals. In short, the
democratization of scholarship in CB is inevitable. It
will help the discipline to have cross-cultural perspec
tives and contexts.
There is an increasing worldwide trend for sharing
such as ridesharing (Uber and Lyft), room sharing
(Airbnb), furniture sharing, as well as garment sharing.
This seems especially true among the well-educated
millennial generation in urban areas where they don’t
have enough cash flow to own real assets such as homes
and cars.
Sharing consumption is a new phenomenon. While it
can be explained by the traditional economic theories of
ability vs willingness to pay or propensity to consume vs
propensity to save, I believe it may also benefit from new
perspectives anchored to societal changes in what con
sumers do today versus a century ago. It may also
require to think through the side effects of ownership
including the stress and the loss of property due to
externalities such as hurricanes and earthquakes. At
a macro-level, it will be interesting to analyze the future
of capitalism which is anchored to ownership of material
possessions such as homes, cars, and appliances. Are
consumers becoming less materialistic? Russell Belk
(1988) in a seminal paper had provided an excellent
framework about material possessions as reflections of
the self and the extended self. As society shifts from
kinship to friendship for social interactions, materialism
may get redefined altogether.
2. Mindful Consumption
4. Cross-Cultural Consumption
As stated before, both public policy and business enter
prises are coming to the same conclusion that sustain
ability is a key strategic issue of the twenty-first century.
With the rise of the brand-conscious middle class in large
emerging markets such as China, India, and now Africa,
there is a strong consensus that planet earth cannot renew
and reproduce fast enough to sustain modern consump
tion (Apte & Sheth, 2017). One solution is mindful con
sumption. In other words, informing, educating, and
enforcing laws and regulations on consumption is the
Another area of consumer research is cross-cultural
differences in consumption of basic needs such as food,
clothing, and shelter. Interest in cross-cultural con
sumption is growing for two reasons. First, since the
liberalization of trade and creation of economic regional
trade blocks such as USMCA (NAFTA) and regional
integration such as the European Union, product and
people mobility has been increasing between nations.
Consequently, in most parts of the world, there are
8
J. SHETH
more cross-cultural differences within the country as
much as or more than between the countries. The best
representation is the United States where cultural diver
sity has grown significantly over time. In California,
Texas, and Florida, the majority are the minorities col
lectively. Social media and ecommerce have provided
access to foreign products and services which has
resulted in more diversity of consumption within each
nation. This has led to fusion in music, concerts, foods,
clothing, and films.
Finally, Sheth (2017) in his book Genes, Climate, and
Consumption Culture has documented that most cul
tural differences can be explained by the migration and
adaptation of genes to local climate (arctic, temperate,
and tropical) for sourcing calories, protein, and fat in
foods and local sourcing of materials such as wool,
leather, and cotton for garments and wood, stone, and
clay for homes. The North-South axis not only explains
differences in food, shelter, and clothing but also differ
ences in cultural traits such as punctuality, friendship,
and uncertainty avoidance.
5. Low-Income Consumers
A growing area of interest in consumer behavior is
the low-income consumers, defined as those who earn
less than two dollars a day in income. The interest in
low-income consumers began with C. K. Prahalad and
his seminal book, The Fortune at the Bottom of the
Pyramid (2005). It advocated that there is a great market
opportunity if the marketer can make the product or the
service more affordable and accessible.
It is estimated that low-income consumer market is
at least 5 USD trillion annually and growing faster
than the global GDP. It is also highly concentrated in
Africa and South Asia. With the cell phone revolution
in both continents, access has become more possible
through eCommerce and market exchanges along with
online payment systems such as Paytm in India and
Mpesa in Kenya. In other words, what is local, unor
ganized and unbranded consumption is transformed
into branded and organized. This is especially true for
cell phones, television, and other consumer electro
nics. It is becoming increasingly true for garments and
personal care products such as toothpaste, soaps, and
shampoos.
6. Consumption of Free Goods
Another growing but neglected area is consumption
of “free” goods. They are free in the sense that the user
does not pay for the product or the service when making
a purchase or using it. There are three types of “free”
goods. The first and the most obvious are social media
and search engines. Facebook, Weibo, WeChat,
WhatsApp, Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, and Google
are obvious examples. However, there are also millions
of free apps on everything ranging from dating sites to
entertainment and news. In all these cases, the user does
not pay and the marketer has to figure who will pay such
as advertisers and the investors.
The second category of “free” goods are parks and
recreation places; museums and public libraries; and of
course highways and freeways. The size of the free goods
market is not documented but it will be safe to assume
that globally it may exceed trillions of dollars.
The third category of “free” goods are products and
services that are subsidized by the governments and the
world organizations. These include school meals, public
transit, non-thermal energy (solar, wind, electric) water,
and other municipal services.
Since price is not the regulator of demand, it will be
replaced by time as a scarce resource. Time is
a perishable asset unlike money. Also, most of the
“free” goods are services which also cannot be stored.
Finally, time constraint may result in more peaks and
valleys (weekend vs weekdays and evening vs day time)
in demand of free goods.
7. Digital First
The seventh and probably the biggest new frontier of
research in CB will be the permanent shift from the
physical first to digital first. Consumers will use their
cellphones and laptops first for information, recommen
dations, new uses of existing products and services, and
learn the use of new products and services. This has
enormous implications for shopping malls and brick
and mortar retail stores. Just as farmers' markets and
flea markets were replaced by grocery stores and shop
ping centers, we will see both of them replaced by
information malls and market place exchanges. What
was peripheral will become core and what is core will
become peripheral. This has happened before when
print media conceded to broadcast media which are
now displaced by social media.
There are several interesting observations and impli
cations of this transformation. First, this is truly
a global phenomenon, whether it is China, India,
Europe, or America. Since massive data are available
in the public domain, access to data will no longer be
a “data divide” between the advanced and the emerging
market scholars. Second, discontinuity of generations
and succession of family values will make the consumer
more dependent on influencers and peer groups across
the globe.
JOURNAL OF MARKETING THEORY AND PRACTICE
Finally, and most importantly, family or households
as a consumption unit will be displaced by the individual
as the unit of analysis, and understanding, and influence.
If the last half-century was exciting in consumer
behavior, the next half-century will be even more
exciting for research. Equally important, scholarship
in consumer behavior will be more democratized and
equalized between the United States and Europe and
between advanced economies and the emerging mar
kets. Finally, CB will become more mainstream in
behavioral and social sciences including psychology,
economics, sociology, and anthropology. This will
lead to further separation of consumer behavior from
marketing.
Evolution of marketing science
The roots of today’s marketing analytics go back to the
late fifties and early sixties when several market
research companies offered their household panel
data for academic research. Just as PIMs database and
Porter’s competitive strategy framework shifted the
marketing discipline from descriptive to predictive
science, these longitudinal panels with actual buying
behavior (as reported by panel members) shifted mar
keting research from opinions and preferences to ana
lyzing real buying behavior at a brand level. This was
further augmented by Paul Samuelson’s advocacy for
“Revealed Preferences” as a basis for data analysis with
the use of econometrics Marketing was also criticized
as a “feely touchy” science with weak measures. It
needed to become more scientific. There were numer
ous debates and discussions whether marketing is
(or should be) an art or a science. At the same time,
operations research techniques such as linear program
ming, queing theory, game theory, and stochastic mod
els became accessible through software platforms such
as BIOMED, SPSS, and SAS. Large-scale data analysis
became feasible albeit expensive and slow in the legacy
era of mainframe computers.Several scholars in quan
titative marketing including Alfred Kuehn, Robert
Buzzel, Frank Bass, Michael Pessemier, William
Massey (and his students), David Montgomery and
Don Morrison, and John D.C. Little and his MIT col
leagues became dominant scholars in marketing’s evo
lution as a science (Winer & Neslin, 2014).
This was a golden era of operation research across all
disciplines of business including marketing. New jour
nals such as Operations Research Quarterly and
Management Science became dominant academic jour
nals for quantitative papers. In marketing, there was also
the birth of the Journal of Marketing Research (JMR)
published by the American Marketing Association.
9
In the 1970s and all through the 1990s, operations
research techniques began to give way to multivariate
methods (Sheth, 1977) such as factor analysis and dis
criminant analysis. These were further augmented by
conjoint analysis, multidimensional scaling (MDS),
and cluster analysis.
Paul Green at the Wharton School and several of his
former students notably Vithala Rao evangelized con
joint analysis and multidimensional scaling. Marketing
discipline and market research began to shift from
econometrics to psychometrics. This ultimately culmi
nated in the use of structural equation modeling and
LISREL as a comprehensive method to model cause and
effect. Richard Bagozzi became a strong proponent of
LISREL as an overarching conceptual as well as
a quantitative method for research in marketing.
In parallel, motivation research anchored to focused
groups, in-depth interviews, and projective techniques
began to embrace more physiological measures such as
pupil dilation, tachistoscope, and more recently, brain
imaging. Just as operations research shifted analyzing
and understanding consumer preferences to actual buy
ing behavior, biometrics shifted consumer’s verbal
responses to physiological measures. Unfortunately,
due to high cost and long cycle time, biometrics did
not become mainstream in marketing science. It faded
away in history and may be rediscovered sometime in
the future.
Since the late nineties, there has been resurgence of
marketing models anchored to economics and choice
models. Most of the research is large-scale empirical
research on scanner data. Equally popular has been the
use of customer lifetime value (CLV) analysis following
theory development anchored to relationship marketing
and loyalty programs. The best-known scholars include
V. Kumar, Peter Fader, Scott Neslin, Fred Feinberger,
and Werner Reinhartz. The formation of ISMS and its
research journal, Marketing Science enabled this shift to
empirical research and marketing models.
More recently, there has been a significant shift
toward research on big data (non-numerical data such
as text messages) on social media using natural language
processing (NLP). A special focus has been the impact of
online word of mouth (WoM) influence of users and
influencers. Social media is now becoming advertising
media with user-generated content surpassing marketer
content. For example, YouTube adds millions of userproduced videos each day. Video is now also a reality on
Facebook and WhatsApp. Research on non-numerical
data (qualitative data) has also changed the vocabulary
from marketing models to marketing analytics. In the
process, marketing science is less anchored to any one
theory. Instead, it is becoming a discovery science.
10
J. SHETH
The sheer magnitude of big data and its inherent
diversity (text, numbers, emoji, video) are making tradi
tional techniques obsolete. In the past, techniques such
as Markov chains and linear programming were in
search of data. In the future, data will be in search of
techniques, most of it not invented yet.
New frontiers of research in marketing analytics
There are at least six new frontiers of research in market
ing analytics.
1. Text Mining
The most obvious and the growing field is text
mining with the use of natural language processing
(NLP). NLP is becoming a more mature technique
and it is converging toward an agreed-upon methodol
ogy of transforming text and other non-numerical data
into quantifiable data suitable for statistical analysis
and inference. The potential in text mining is enor
mous, ranging from user experiences on a brand, pro
duct, or service to spread of false news and brand
rumors. Another major area of text mining is a crosscultural comparison on user-generated content and
product or service experiences. This is especially useful
for large global enterprises such as Starbucks,
McDonald’s, Walmart, and Amazon. The third area
of growing research based on text mining is crisis
management. How do you cope with such black swan
(Taleb, 2007) events such as the coronavirus? Finally,
social media and especially Twitter data are becoming
mainstream for research in political marketing.
major social media platform. While we know the art and
science of video editing from the entertainment (movies
and television) industries, we have no clue how to ana
lyze video content.
Video content is also exploding with online learning
through MOOCs such as Courseara and Edex as well as
holding remote conferences and classrooms as we are
experiencing now due to the coronavirus (Covid-19)
pandemic. Platforms such as Zoom and Facetime are
becoming mainstream. Finally, the cost of digital storage
is very low. It is almost free as compared to storage of
print documents. What we need is syndicated services
such as A.C. Nielsen panel of television viewing so that
the methodology and representations are standardized
for analysis and prediction.
4. Imaging Research
As mentioned before, while biometrics is out of favor
in marketing analytics, there is still an interest in brain
research (brain scanning). Brain research is becoming
a more mature science and fMRI is becoming more
mainstream. At the same time, facial recognition tech
niques are becoming a reality, especially in homeland
security. As communities install more cameras and
other surveillance devices and as personal devices such
as cellphones can be accessed by facial recognition.
There will be a growing interest in retailing and other
location-based services. The movie, Minority Report,
articulated how facial recognition can be used in shop
ping as well as in homeland security. Again data will be
in search of techniques.
5. Fuzzy Logic
2. Emoji Analytics
Emojis have grown significantly as a part of large
messy data. We have not yet discovered or invented
a technique to analyze and provide consumer insights
anchored to emojis. The number of emojis has grown
exponentially in recent years. While one can use our
knowledge of ideography, we are still at an infancy
stage in the analysis of emoji data. Fortunately, unlike
the text data, emojis are well defined and there is
a dictionary of meanings for each emoji. This should
enable scholars to analyze the data and discover the
emotive dimensions in user-generated content.
3. Video Analytics
Probably the biggest wave of information on the
worldwide web and social media will be the video con
tent. This is led by YouTube today but it will be on every
It is surprising to note that fuzzy logic developed in
mathematics more than 40 years ago is still not used as
a technique in marketing. Fuzzy logic is pattern recogni
tion with partial or insufficient information about an
object or an incident. It is a technique embedded in
cell phones and in many manufacturing industries. It is
often embedded as a chip in most imaging devices.
Fuzzy logic seems very useful in facial recognition and
personal identification.
6. Forensic Research
Probably the most exciting field of research in mar
keting analytics is forensic research. Despite prior mar
ket tests, new product failures are still very high.
Similarly, most advertising campaigns do not generate
incremental revenue as forecasted despite prior pretests
and consumer feedback. In order to improve the science
JOURNAL OF MARKETING THEORY AND PRACTICE
of marketing, it is maybe more important to analyze and
identify why some products flourish and others fizzle.
This is especially important in emerging markets, where
many multinationals fail for the same product or service
they are successful in advanced countries (Immelt et al.,
2009). Forensic research is a well-established science in
criminal investigations. It is becoming more and more
common in accounting to investigate fraud and embez
zlement. It is conspicuously absent in marketing analy
tics despite the availability of historical data.
As mentioned before, fifty years ago when marketing
science emerged as a special field of research, the tech
niques were in search of data. In the future, data will be
in search of techniques. Hopefully, scholars in market
ing analytics will invent or develop new techniques to
analyze these new types of data.
Drivers of convergence
As mentioned before, over the last fifty years, market
ing discipline has diverged into three subdisciplines:
marketing strategy, consumer behavior, and marketing
analytics. Each has its own academic associations, jour
nals, and courses. In both marketing management and
consumer behavior, there are standard textbooks.
Marketing analytics is still subsumed under market
research. It is, however, a matter of time before a standalone textbook for marketing analytics will be pub
lished, especially in light of offering specialized
Master’s Degree programs in marketing analytics.
After 50 years, it seems that there are four external
drivers (forces) which may drive more convergence
among the three sub-disciplines. The first is social
media and the user-generated content. Each discipline
now analyzes data from social media for managerial,
methodological, and consumer insights, respectively.
A second external force-driving convergence is the
growth of emerging markets. Emerging markets are
transforming from the traditional societies anchored to
the agricultural age into more contemporary societies as
they transition the agriculture sector to the manufactur
ing sector (China) or the services sector (India). This has
led to the rise of a brand-conscious middle class. The
traditional unorganized channels of distribution offering
unbranded products and services are replaced by
branded products and services and offered by organized
retailing. Examples include Walmart in India, China,
and Mexico, Alibaba in China, and Flipkart and
Amazon in India. Each sub-discipline of marketing
(managerial, analytics, and CB) is all doing research on
emerging marketing.
The third external force is the rise of corporate
social responsibility (CSR) on a worldwide basis with
11
a focus on environmental sustainability and climate
change. Once again, scholars in each of the three subdisciplines are doing research on CSR and public pol
icy. Finally, automation of consumption is now
a reality. At the start of the industrial age, there was
the automation of production. This was followed by
automation of distribution, which was in turn fol
lowed by automation of commerce culminating today
into full-blown ecommerce and electronic market
exchanges. This is now migrating to automation of
consumption including the use of artificial intelli
gence, machine learning, and virtual reality. For exam
ple, today it is possible to have a robot as a companion
at home and virtual robots becoming personal digital
assistants (PDA) to carry out most of the daily chores.
Alexa and Siri are emerging as voice-activated routi
nization of daily chores from the time a consumer
wakes up to the time he or she goes to sleep. This
automation of consumption will encourage each of the
three sub-disciplines of marketing to explore the
fundamental shift from the consumer going to the
market to the market coming to the consumer’s
home or office.
Concluding remarks
The state of marketing has been bright in the last fifty
years as marketing began the transition from
a descriptive to a predictive science. The divergence of
marketing into separate subdisciplines of consumer
behavior and marketing analytics has encouraged more
scholars from other disciplines to focus on marketing.
The future of marketing in the next 50 years will be even
brighter in each of the three sub-disciplines. I admire the
younger scholars and wish them well in ensuring that
marketing is well respected by other disciplines as well as
the society at large. Indeed as a discipline, marketing will
be even more exciting in the future.
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