Marketing Insights from Multimedia Data: Text, Image, Audio, and Video

Journal of Marketing Research Special Issue Call for Papers

Today, marketing executives and researchers have access to a wide variety of multimedia data: text from social media posts and online reviews, images and videos posted on Instagram or Snapchat, and audio data from customer service interactions. Despite their ubiquity, marketing scholars have only just begun to explore the rich insights these data can provide, and tackle the formidable methodological challenges entailed in analyzing unstructured multimedia data. This special issue intends to bring together cutting-edge research using one or more types of multimedia data to address substantive and/or methodological issues related to the broad discipline of marketing. 

A unifying theme for this special issue is the use of multimedia data to provide insight into relevant marketing questions. All perspectives and approaches are welcome, including (but not limited to) behavioral, economic, statistical, and strategic. Methodologically, we embrace a variety of methods, including lab experiments, field experiments, secondary datasets, market-research studies, and qualitative research. We welcome applications that tackle a wide range of questions. Examples include, but are not limited to: 

Behavioral and Consumer Research Issues

• What insights can multimedia data—text, image, audio, and/or video—provide into consumer behavior? Media might shape consumer information processing, future preferences, purchase likelihood or future actions, among other variables.
• How does the semantic content (e.g., words salespeople and customer-service agents use) and the way semantic content is used (e.g., pitch or tone, non-verbal aspects of interactions) shape persuasion and customer satisfaction?
• What can we learn about shopping behavior by analyzing multimedia data such as in-store videos, digital store-front tracking, or images posted on social media?

Methodological and Quantitative Research Issues

• What analytical tools might be developed to optimize firm communication with customers through multimodal methods texts, images, audio, and/or video data? 
• How might we apply and improve natural language processing methods to aid and inform traditional marketing research? 
• How can machine learning be used to overcome the enormous complexities posed by multimedia data?
  

Managerial Issues 

• How can user-generated content provide insights for marketing decisions, including segmentation, targeting, and positioning? 
• How can we quantify the business impact of marketing decisions and consumer behavior by studying rich media content? 
• What are the implications of artificial intelligence and synthetic content generation technology for marketing? 
• When might multimedia data replace traditional information gathering methods such as surveys?
  

These issues represent just a sampling of the research topics within the domain of “Marketing Insights from Multimedia Data.” 

Process: Manuscript submissions are open now and will remain open until 1 April 2019 through JMR Manuscript Central. The JMR editorial team will manage the submissions, with help of appropriate Guest Associate Editors.