Where’s the interactive marketing in the interactive marketing literature? A state-of-the-art review and research agenda

Purpose It might be surprising to learn that a relatively small percentage of articles have interactive marketing (IM) in the title and/or listed as a designated subject or topic area. This is an important distinction in that the Journal of Research in Interactive places priority on research contributions that explicitly utilize IM concepts, theories and practices. Given this gap, we conduct an extensive review of the literature studies that explicitly address the principles of IM, provide a historical perspective of the evolution of IM (Table 3), create an IM framework and offer a future research agenda. Design/methodology/approach Articles for inclusion in the review met two criteria: IM was mentioned in the title and/or was a designated subject term. A total of 751 articles were included across 39 journals. To identify potential content areas, author-defined keywords and subject terms were uploaded into ChatGPT and refined by the authors (Table 1). Findings A 34-year review of articles with IM in the title and/or as a subject area revealed 10 content areas: engagement and experience; consumer behavior and decision-making; technology and interactivity; e-commerce and online behavior; trust, privacy and ethics; branding and brand management; social media and influencer marketing; advertising and communication; AI and automation; and word-of-mouth (Tables 3 and 4, Figure 1). Social implications The reviewed literature includes research related to trust, privacy and ethics. Originality/value While thousands of important articles investigate topics in the broad context of IM, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first of its kind to explicitly focus on articles with IM in its title or as a subject/topic area. Figure 2 offers a research framework.