Technological advances have opened up new opportunities for marketers, consumers, and marketing researchers. Marketers are leveraging new approaches for creating and capturing customer value (e.g., new product design, dynamic pricing) and communicating that value (e.g., social media influencers). Consumers are engaging in new ways with products, services, organizations, and each other. Researchers have access to new forms of data from multiple sources—and potentially new ways for their research to contribute.
In this special issue, we will publish papers testing new and improved methods for the future of marketing. These methods may collect insights from new sources, analyze new or existing data in new ways, combine data from multiple sources or multiple media, or improve on existing methods by analyzing data more accurately or efficiently. We share several examples below:
- New sources of data: A dramatic expansion in consumer genetic testing has allowed governments and firms to amass huge genomic data sets, and we are just starting to understand how these data can be leveraged to better understand consumer preferences (Daviet and Nave 2024). Large language models (LLMs) have the potential to generate marketing research data (Arora, Chakraborty, and Nishimura 2024), though cautions have been raised about using recursively generated data (Shumailov et al. 2024). Which other new data sources should marketers consider?
- New experiences: LLMs offer researchers new possibilities for designing products (e.g., Sisodia, Burnap and Kumar 2024), creating new consumer environments (e.g., virtual fitting rooms; Yang, Xiong and Ma 2023), generating content (Resisenbichler et al. 2022), and interacting with customers (e.g., virtual agents). What are the opportunities and limitations of these methods for customers, firms, and policy makers? How can researchers effectively utilize these opportunities in their research?
- New insights from traditional data sources: Longitudinal transaction data have been analyzed for decades, but new techniques may allow these data to offer new insights, such as flexibly estimating customer routines (Dew et al. 2024). New techniques are also needed to draw additional insights from unstructured data, such as applying machine learning models to online review data (Kim, Lee, and McCollough 2024) or adding metaphors to analyze marketplace sentiment (Luri, Schau, and Ghosh 2024).
- New modality-specific frameworks: While there are emerging frameworks for text analytics (Packard, Moore and Berger 2023), there is still room for advancement (e.g., Luangrath, Xu, and Wang 2023 study paralinguistics). Marketing also needs more methodological guidance for modalities such as images and voice (Melzner and Raghubir 2023) and for multimodal channels such as video.
- New combinations of data from multiple sources, media, and modalities: JMR’s 2021 special issue on Marketing Insights from Multimedia Data highlighted work combining data across sources and modalities, such as acoustic features, metadata, and text (Boughanmi and Ansari 2021). Recent work has combined sources such as social media post histories with survey responses (Schoenmueller, Blanchard, and Johar 2024). Where are there opportunities for deriving new insight by combining sources and modalities at critical points in the customer journey?
- Improvements on existing methods: We’d also like to see submissions that focus on increasing the accuracy or efficiency of existing methods, such as more effectively eliciting sensitive information in surveys (Gregori, de Jong, and Pieters 2024), better measuring willingness to pay (He, Anderson, and Rucker 2024), or reducing bias in estimates of endogenous regressors (Qian and Xie 2024). New methods may have practical benefits, such as improving the predictions of critical outcomes such as whether customers will return to a store (Anderson et al. 2024) or increasing scalability, such as the ability to handle large video content (Zhou, Chen, Ferreira and Smith 2021).
These are only a few examples; we look forward to reviewing your papers proposing and testing new and improved methods across behavioral, quantitative and strategy domains in marketing.
Special Issue Submission and Review Process
All submissions will go through JMR’s double-anonymized review and follow the journal’s standard norms and processes. Submissions must be made via JMR’s ScholarOne site, with author guidelines available here.
Submission deadline: September 1, 2025
Special Issue Editorial Team
The current JMR Coeditors—Rebecca Hamilton, Brett R. Gordon, Raghuram Iyengar, Kapil Tuli, and Karen Page Winterich—will handle submissions for the special issue.