مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد تصمیم گیری در مورد بازاریابی در محیط های بازاریابی مدرن – الزویر 2023

Abstract

Currently, marketing is undergoing a major shift driven by environmental disruptions and advances in marketing technologies. This shift has implications for marketing decision-making. However, research on how marketing managers navigate modern marketing environments’ complex, volatile, and data-intensive nature is limited. This study addresses this gap by qualitatively analyzing marketing managers’ decision-making processes in 15 companies. Using the naturalistic decision-making approach and the situative perspective on cognition and action as theoretical lenses, we identify three key characteristics of decision-making in modern marketing environments—namely, agility, inventiveness, and reflexiveness. Our findings provide empirically grounded insights into the cognitive and behavioral processes involved in marketing decision-making and contribute to a deeper understanding of how managers navigate—and respond to—modern marketing environments’ challenges.

Introduction

In the current business landscape, which is characterized by continuous flux and uncertainty (Minciu et al., 2020), and simultaneously flooded with data (Bradlow et al., 2017), the nature of marketing is undergoing transformation. Marketing technology’s rapid development (Hoffman et al., 2022) brings increased opportunities to communicate and engage with customers, as well as follow and analyze their behaviors and sentiments (Holmlund, et al., 2020). These changing circumstances have altered marketing managers’ decision-making behaviors (Hoffman, et al., 2022). On the one hand, the availability of specific real-time data implies opportunities for marketing managers to make informed decisions to meet their customers’ dynamic needs and keep up with changes in the environment. On the other hand, the dynamics and complexity of marketing—combined with those of the business environment at large—challenge even experienced marketing managers (Moisander et al., 2020). Their current schemas for interpreting marketing problems and opportunities, including strategies for acting on these, might be insufficient or even obsolete (Laureiro‐Martínez & Brusoni, 2018). Accordingly, to provide valuable insights for both scholars and practitioners, we propose conducting further research on how marketing managers handle decision-making in the complex, data-intensive, and dynamic modern marketing environment.

Discussion of findings and contributions

This study aimed to investigate the nature of marketing managers’ decision-making behaviors and unravel the specific decision-making actions they engage in to handle today’s volatile, complex, and data-intensive marketing environments. Based on the empirical findings presented above, we suggest that a “modern” approach to decision-making in marketing can be described as the dynamic and purposeful optimizing of progress towards organizational goals in alignment with strategic agendas. By this we refer to the general nature of decision-making as an expedition in which marketing managers pursue the best possible outcomes in an ongoing exploratory act over time. This is as opposed to solving specific marketing problems or tasks as discrete decisions. We understand this approach to decision-making as a direct consequence of the volatility and complexity that signify today’s data-intensive decision-making scenes. The resulting uncertainties regarding appropriate courses of action and the potential consequences of different options call for a revised decision-making approach.

According to our study, DMM is characterized by agile, inventive, and reflexive behaviors realized through six groups of micro-level actions (surveilling, scanning, leveraging, reframing, corroborating, and challenging). The AIR model, shown in Fig. 1, integrates and visualizes our findings and conclusions. The visual metaphor of the triple helix illustrates the cyclical nature of the DMM and the dynamic interplay between micro-level actions and an evolving marketing environment. DMM is not agile, inventive, or reflexive. The DMM is simultaneously agile, inventive, and reflexive, and these characteristics constitute the three helices of the model. In sum, the agility of decision-making is a means of keeping up with the evolving outside world of customers and other stakeholders, which is not easily predictable. Inventiveness is about taking command of development, and proactively progressing the organization and its complex environment towards intended goals. Reflexivity holds everything together and ensures that decisions are as grounded and aligned with situational and contextual requirements as possible.