The disruptive potential of drones
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The disruptive potential of drones Stefanie Beninger 1
& Karen
Robson 2
Accepted: 22 September 2020/ # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Drones are increasingly being used in marketing. Yet, despite rapidly growing adoption and incredible versatility, drones hardly feature in marketing research. This oversight is striking as their unique characteristics and the plethora of applications have major consequences for marketing. In particular, we outline how drones have implications for theory and practice in relation to business models, consumers, and society and public policy. We highlight these far-reaching consequences and provide a rich future research trajectory aimed to further theory development on the emerging phenomenon of drones. Keywords Drones . Unmanned aerial vehicles . Marketing
1 Introduction Drones—unmanned vehicles (e.g., airplanes, helicopters, submarines, or boats) that are controlled remotely by humans or artificial intelligence—are increasingly used around the world. Drones can be powered by battery, solar, or gas and vary in size—they can be small enough to fit in a hand or large enough to carry considerable amounts of cargo or people. These devices range in price from a few hundred to tens of thousands of dollars. The popularity of drones has grown dramatically in recent years, with millions of units sold globally and media headlines hailing the explosive demand for drones as a revolution.
* Stefanie Beninger [email protected] Karen Robson [email protected]
1
IE Business School, IE University, Calle de María de Molina, 11, 28006 Madrid, Spain
2
Odette School of Business, University of Windsor, 401 Sunset Ave, Windsor, Ontario N9B 3P4, Canada
Marketing Letters
Drones have significant potential to impact the marketing function. Current uses range from small-scale applications in which drones carry advertising banners over public events, to potential wide-scale use to deliver essential services to vulnerable consumers, to the collection of massive amounts of information. Major brands such as Amazon, Google, Alibaba, 7-Eleven, Facebook, and the Red Cross have used or are testing drones in their marketing operations. Despite increasing commercial and public attention on drones, there has been limited scholarly attention on them in business in general, and especially marketing. In one exception, Ferrell and Ferrell (2020) draw attention to integrating drone marketing into marketing education. In another, Khan et al. (2019) highlight some potential concerns with drone marketing in Pakistan. However, much more remains to be done. Drones are uniquely poised to disrupt traditional marketing practices due to their incredible versatility and ability to operate outside of conventional marketing approaches. Below, we discuss how drones change the nature of marketing and outline areas of marketing scholarship that would benefit from better understanding of the disruptive potential of drones.
2 Drones and marketing Given how drone technology is de
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