International Journal of Research in Marketing最新文献

The creator economy has led to profound transformations in the way that individuals—content creators—produce and deliver digital content, how they create and appropriate value from such content, and how they grow careers in venturing such content creation. However, despite the industry’s economic significance, the conceptualization of content creators as entrepreneurs remains underexplored. This paper aims to bridge this gap by exploring creators from an entrepreneurial perspective along a creatrepreneur model. Based on an extensive review of academic research, industry reports, as well as eight expert interviews with diverse stakeholders within the creator economy ecosystem, the article defines the scope of creators’ entrepreneurial activities, offers a taxonomy of creator venture models, and develops a framework of key drivers of entrepreneurial success within the creator economy, encompassing both environmental and individual success factors. Building on this conceptualization, this paper further identifies potential avenues for future research in the creator economy, focusing on entrepreneurial strategies in building creator ventures and evaluating their key success factors, and concludes by highlighting empirical challenges in exploring these directions.

Bloggers, streamers, artists, celebrities, musicians and service providers are just a few examples of creators who aim to monetize their talent by generating and posting digital content. Aided by technological platforms and AI tools, they form a complex and dynamic ecosystem of economic activity, estimated to be worth over $100 billion dollars, and growing rapidly. In this editorial we explore the creator economy from a marketing perspective, addressing questions such as: How can creators optimize their content, establish their brand, build their content composition, and expand their audience? How do platforms create the right mix of creators and curate their content? What challenges and opportunities are presented for traditional firms?

We define the basic terminology and identify key stakeholders. We propose research questions related to creators, consumers, firms, and platforms, and discuss the implications for the marketing function within organization. A key insight of this editorial is that although content creators may appear to be a diverse group of individuals operating independently, their joint activity creates emergent patterns that can be monitored, monetized and managed strategically. To achieve this, research must develop suitable metrics and methodologies while adapting relevant marketing constructs.

This editorial is accompanied by four research notes written by marketing scholars, who all learned first-hand from major players in the creator economy. Bleier et al. (2024) examine the role of social media platforms in enabling the creator economy. Hofstetter and Gollnhofer (2024) zoom into one of the most important dilemmas faced by creators on social media: balancing authenticity with monetization. Edeling and Wies (2024) also touch upon monetization in their focus on “creatrepreneurs,” entrepreneurs in the creator economy, and on the ecosystem that enables their activities. And Prandelli et al. (2024) discuss how luxury brands are leveraging the creator economy.

Despite their transformative importance, the perspective and role of social media platforms in the creator economy remains understudied. In this research, we examine the role of platforms in the creator economy using a review approach that leverages insights from both a rich account of the literature on platforms and in-depth interviews with several stakeholders in the creator economy. We develop a framework of the key actors and interactions in the creator economy and the central position of platforms as the underlying ecosystem that supports these elements. In doing so, our frameworks illuminates the focal roles that platforms play in the creator economy: connecting key actors, supporting content creation and management, and facilitating monetization. We use the insights gleaned from the literature and our interviews to overview (1) what we know about each of these roles platforms play, (2) what we do not know, and (3) how each of these roles may look in the future. In doing so, our research proposes directions for future research on the role of platforms in the creator economy.

In social media, remaining authentic while taking advantage of monetizing opportunities is a key dilemma for online content creators—the creator’s dilemma. Individuals typically start as small-scale creators, creating the content they enjoy. As they grow, the temptations of monetization increase, creating tension with their sense of authenticity. This can affect how genuine their content appears, potentially altering how they and others perceive their authenticity. Five in-depth interviews with mega-creators (content creators with more than one million followers) provide qualitative insights into how this dilemma can evolve and what strategies creators use to balance authenticity and monetization. The interviewed creators suggest three strategies, by moving (1) from paid advertising to co-creation with brands, (2) from staging content to improvising content, and (3) from producing content to growing their own creator brand. This non-representative and conceptual discussion motivates future research into the creator’s dilemma.

Generative AI (GenAI) holds the potential to revolutionise marketing education by enhancing the learning experience and addressing long-standing pedagogical challenges. This paper explores the transformative impact of GenAI, focusing on three primary dimensions: cost efficiency & scalability, personalisation & accessibility, and creativity & innovation. However, despite these substantial benefits, GenAI also presents important risks and challenges. I therefore underscore the need for strategic and responsible implementation, recommending several approaches such as foundational AI literacy, human oversight, alignment with learning objectives and bespoke pedagogical frameworks to harness GenAI's full potential while mitigating associated risks. Finally, I emphasise that the discussion should evolve from whether we should use GenAI to when and how we should use it.

Price can have direct psychological effects on utility, beyond the standard indirect substitution effect through its impact on the budget available for other goods. This paper proposes a theory driven modeling framework to (i) empirically disentangle and measure the psychological and substitution effects of price, and (ii) identify heterogeneous drivers of the psychological effect. We then provide a two-step conjoint design to collect necessary data to identify the model and a method to estimate it. We illustrate how the modeling framework can be used with secondary luxury purchase data to measure the psychological and substitution effect, when data on consumer budget for the category is available. We then illustrate our conjoint method, by collecting data for the luxury goods and estimating the model. We find three segments with heterogeneous drivers of the psychological effect: price prestige seeking, self-reward, and price prestige avoidance.

Ad fraud has serious consequences for brands. It also contaminates academic research if scholars neglect a significant level of ad fraud in their data. However, only limited theoretical work has addressed this topic, and empirical research is scarce. In this article, we take a first step to document empirical patterns of mobile ad fraud using two datasets. The datasets are commonly available to buyers of advertising services, and the types of ad fraud studied are significant in the advertising market. We identify some app and campaign characteristics correlated with ad fraud, and uncover methods used by fraudsters to conceal the fraud. They often make the ad fraud proportional to the daily traffic but lowering the ratio of ad fraud on high-traffic days. However, when traffic is unstable, they change strategy to use ad fraud to smooth out the traffic. Meanwhile, in advertising campaigns, the fraudsters allocate most part of fraud during the middle of campaign period, an attempt to reduce the risk of being detected. These findings not only help practitioners and academic researchers determine the extent of ad fraud in the data but also provide stylized facts for future research on theoretical modeling of ad fraud.

Salespeople are inundated with new sales enablement tools and digital communication options daily, creating new ways to communicate with customers and navigate the inevitable case of “dropping the ball.” This research investigates how different communication formats cushion the blow and minimize damage from salesperson transgressions. Study 1 utilizes firm-provided communication and performance data paired with survey data from business-to-business (B2B) customers to find that the use of synchronous communication (face-to-face (F2F) in contrast to email) mitigates the negative impact of relational transgression but has no such effect on the impact of sales process transgression. Study 2 utilizes an experiment with B2B professionals to identify that synchronous communication (videoconferencing and F2F in contrast to email) improves relationship satisfaction and customer positive word of mouth (PWOM) more for relational than sales process transgressions. Study 3 extends these findings with an experiment exploring additional communication formats (phone and text) while exploring perceived salesperson competence and warmth as mediating mechanisms in the model. Taken together, F2F or synchronous communications should not be viewed as the unilaterally preferred communication format during transgressions, and salespeople should balance communication needs with resource constraints.