EDITORIALVENKATESH SHANKAR AND EDWARD C. MALTHOUSE

MOVING INTERACTIVE

MARKETING FORWARD

2

VENKATESH SHANKAR

is Professor of Marketing and

Coleman Chair in Marketing, Mays

Business School, Texas A & M

University, College Station;

e-mail: vshankar@mays.tamu.edu

EDWARD C. MALTHOUSE

is an Associate Professor in

Integrated Marketing

Communications,

Medill School of Journalism,

Northwestern University, Evanston, IL;

e-mail:ecm@northwestern.edu

This is our first editorial together as co-editors of the Journal of InteractiveMarketing (JIM). We first want to thank the outgoing co-editor, Russ Winer,for his dedication to developing the quality and reputation of JIM. We alsothank the previous editors, John Deighton and Rashi Glazer, for their visionand efforts to establish the journal, and Don Schultz for starting the Journalof Direct Marketing, the predecessor to JIM.

The field of interactive marketing is rapidly changing and expanding. Usingmultiple devices such as kiosks, PCs, handheld devices, and multiple inter-action forms such as mail, the Web, and face-to-face meeting, customers andother stakeholders and the companies with whom they do business, are nowinteracting in ways vastly different from those in the past. Firms’ interac-tions with end users are managed by customer relationship management(CRM) systems and databases that enable the companies to customize con-tacts in real-time across multiple media platforms and channels. Many com-munications between organizations and consumers leave a data trail thatcan be analyzed, so that the effect of the contact can be measured and futurecommunications can be optimized. The public is being inundated by mar-keting messages. These dramatic changes raise issues of consumer privacy

© 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. and Direct Marketing Educational Foundation, Inc.

JOURNAL OF INTERACTIVE MARKETING VOLUME 20 / NUMBER 1 / WINTER 2006

Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/dir.20057

The authors thank Arvind Rangaswamy (Pennsylvania State University) and Tom Collinger

(Northwestern University) for comments on earlier drafts.

Journal of Interactive Marketing DOI: 10.1002/dir

MOVING INTERACTIVE MARKETING FORWARD 3

and trust, and challenge the ways organizations com-municate with consumers. Adding to these changesare the increasingly blurred lines between marketingmessages, news, media, and entertainment. There isa consolidation and collaboration of industries includ-ing advertising and marketing agencies, databaseand technology companies, consumer-research orga-nizations, and media and entertainment companies.

The current vision for JIM, articulated in Winer andShankar (2003), is ideally suited for these dynamicconditions:

Our vision is to be a premier academic journal withhigh managerial relevance in the area of interac-tive marketing. We want JIM to be a thoughtleader and catalyst for shaping ideas and issuesassociated with electronic, interactive, and directmarketing environments. We would like to continu-ally improve the quality of papers published andraise the awareness and visibility of the journal.We plan to publish leading edge ideas, methodolo-gies, and insights in the area of interactive market-ing. The papers should be managerially importantand should have the potential to impact managerialthinking and practice in this area. (p. 3)

In this editorial, we would like to extend and clarifythe vision for JIM by articulating an expanded scopeof interactive marketing. Interactive marketing is anintegrated exchange process by which an organizationuses the understanding of customer behavior, tech-nology, and other resources to create and managecustomer value and collaborative relationships andenhance shareholder value through relevant brands,

products/service offerings, ideas, and messagescommunicated and delivered to the right customersthrough appropriate channels and contact points atappropriate times. We view this definition1 as a sim-ple and concise way of characterizing what Deightonand Glazer (1998) described as “a customer informa-tion-driven perspective on the increasing appropriateway of integrated strategic marketing decision-making” (p. 2). As illustrated in Figure 1, the use ofunderstanding of customers, technology, and otherresources (top corner) indicates that qualitative andquantitative marketing research, the analysis of largedatabases of customer information (e.g., transactionalhistories, Web logs, call-center logs, etc.), technology,and theories of customer behavior enable interactivemarketers to understand their customers. This under-standing and the use of resources are necessary tocreate relevant brands and product/service offeringsas well as the ideas and messages to communicate tothe customers or other stakeholders (lower left cor-ner). Customer interactions with the brand or firmare made through multiple communication and deliv-ery channels and contact points (lower right corner),including traditional media, Web sites, wirelessdevices, podcasts, blogs, and so on. They are often, butnot always, collaborative, adaptive, technology-enabled, and customized with customer-level data. Allcontacts must be managed across customers, commu-nication and distribution channels, contact points,

TM

Use of Understanding of Customers,Technology, Other Resources

Brands, Ideas,Product/ServiceOfferings, Messages

Communication andDelivery Channels and

Contact Points

InteractiveMarketing:

Create and ManageCustomer Value and

Relationships for EnhancingShareholder Value

FIGURE 1Illustration of Interactive Marketing

1 The motivation for this definition and the triad in Figure 1 arefrom strategic planning discussions for the Department ofIntegrated Marketing Communications at NorthwesternUniversity.

4 JOURNAL OF INTERACTIVE MARKETING

and time with the goal of creating customer value andbuilding long-term relationships with the right cus-tomers and maximizing shareholder value.

With this expanded scope of interactive marketing,open research questions abound. JIM has earned areputation for being a leading publication for high-quality research on these topics. We plan to build onthis reputation by continuing to publish cutting-edgeconcepts, theories, methods, and applications in the

broadened scope of interactive marketing. We inviteall those who do research in interactive marketing tosubmit their best work to JIM.

REFERENCESDeighton, J., & Glazer, R. (1998). From the Editors. Journal

of Interactive Marketing, 12(1), 2–4.

Winer, R.S., & Shankar, V. (2003). A New Vision for theJournal. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 17(1), 2–4.

Journal of Interactive Marketing DOI: 10.1002/dir