The changing role of marketing: transformed propositions, processes and partnerships
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THEORY/CONCEPTUAL
The changing role of marketing: transformed propositions, processes and partnerships Kaj Storbacka 1 & Ted Moser 2
# The Author(s) 2020
Digital transformation of marketing Digitalization affects every aspect of a firm’s business model– from front-end to back-office, from how firms create value for their customers to how they capture value– and doing so can reshape every facet of the firm. By adapting their business models to the possibilities of technology, firms are facing an accelerating transformation of their activities, offering new opportunities for “out-of-the-box” development of new processes and tools, which effectively challenge deeply engrained functional silo-based thinking. Despite the ubiquity of digital transformation, much academic research still seems to take a functional view (Verhoef et al. 2019), where information systems look into the development and adoption of specific technologies (Nambisan et al. 2017) or analytics schemes (Davenport and Ronanki 2018), strategic management research focuses on understanding the role of new digitalized business models (Foss and Saebi 2017), and marketing research focuses on what is generally called “digital marketing” or the development of an omnichannel environment (Verhoef et al. 2015; Lamberton and Stephen 2016; Kannan and Li 2017). Lately, some researchers have argued for multi-, cross-, and/or trans-disciplinary approaches to digital transformation (Kumar 2018; Crittenden and Peterson 2019; Verhoef et al. 2019; Grewal et al. 2020). Instead of digitalizing existing practices within silos, we need new ways to cross-fertilize the insights from different functional development streams into a coherent firm-wide approach. Staying in the functional silos may, for instance, lead to ignoring relevant opportunities for new work divisions between the functions.
* Kaj Storbacka [email protected] 1
Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland
2
Prophet, San Francisco, USA
This view of digital transformation challenges many of the fundamental theories and concepts that management and marketing have been built on. This drives us to evaluate, for instance, how economies of scale work, if transaction costs can be used to define firm boundaries, how we define markets, and how to measure value (Storbacka 2018). Consequently, marketing scholarship actively questions the boundaries of marketing and calls have been made for the need to engage in research that actively removes the blinders of the “mainstream assumptions, theories and methods” (Moorman et al. 2019, p.1), with the aim to uncover new ways to look at value creation in the market. Practitioners are facing this dilemma in real time. This interview with Ted Moser, who advises firms on the digital transformation of marketing, aims at identifying “boundarybreaking” ideas that can form the basis for new types of research questions. Ted holds an MBA in marketing and strategy from the Wharton Business School. He has 30 years of experience advising leading firms on growth strategies that ca
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