The rapid digital transformation and the ever-changing needs of consumers have provided both academia and practice a stimulating setting and chance for grasping evolving opportunities and reinventing the traditional marketing approaches. Agility is one emergent approach to manage challenges like increasing uncertainty or high volatility. Due to its relative novelty, the extant academic literature on marketing agility is narrow, and although the operationalization of the construct is slowly expanding, there is yet the need for further refinement of the definition, the construct, terminology, and its dimensions. Similarly, in practitioner circles there is a growing “buzz” about implementing agile practices (e.g., continuous feedback-learning cycles, collaboration, flexibility, and speed) in the field of marketing to manage changing market environments. What exactly makes an organization, a department, or a team agile is, however, still blurred.

Marketing academics and practitioners have discerned the evolution in the prominence of digital, social media and mobile marketing based on technological innovations. Digital marketing has evolved over time from a specific marketing of products and services using digital channels to activities, institutions and processes facilitated by digital technologies. From an inclusive perspective, digital marketing refers to an adaptive, technology-enabled process by which firms collaborate with customers and partners to jointly create, communicate, deliver and sustain value for all stakeholders. Digital technologies allow the new adaptive process, institution and processes in marketing communication. The adaptive process creates value in new ways in new digital environments. Institutions build foundational capabilities to create such value jointly for their customers and for themselves. Processes create value through new customer experiences and through interactions among customers. The purpose of the assessment is to establish the current status of research evaluating digital marketing communication and to show how digital technology has shaped marketing communication evaluations. This study provides a broad disciplinary review of key cited works in digital marketing communication research and examines the effectiveness of various evaluation approaches, including new directions designed to capture meaningful insights and marketing communication value in digital marketing communication.

Marketing and market research are centered on the need to explore consumer experiences to inform management decisions. Heuristics and biases are of interest to marketing practitioners as these influences can impact data that is delivered to inform decisions. Existing research listing heuristics and biases alongside management strategies is limited to five reviews presenting frameworks and/or detailing heuristics and biases, none of which have been extended to a marketing context. This research 1) details the heuristics of interest to marketing practitioners by presenting n=7 core heuristics and the mechanisms of their operation and 2) examine solutions and proposed frameworks reported within the literature to avoid or acknowledge biases which may be present.

The practice of relationship marketing strategies is the core of the success of marketing for any kind of organizations. The study develops relevant research issues and propositions for empirical investigation based on the strategies of relationship marketing offered by Berry (1983) such as core service strategy, customization strategy, augmentation strategy, relationship pricing strategy, and internal marketing strategy. Relating to relationship marketing theory, agencies and clients are aware of in providing and taking core services, Agencies customize the relationship and augment the services to satisfy and retain their clients. Considering the account size and length of relationship agencies offer relationship pricing. All agencies maintain strong interaction among the employees and different departments as a part of their internal marketing practice.

The article empirically examines the practice of internal marketing based on a case study of an advertising agency. To this end, explaining the significance of internal marketing for the success of external marketing and the concept of internal marketing, the article reports research findings which link theory and practice.

The marketing practice in several industries, including fashion and luxury goods, increasingly relies on the utilization of shared product platforms across different brands (Halman, Hofer, & Van Vuuren, 2003; Krishnan & Gupta, 2003; Luo, 2011; Sawnhey, 1998). For instance, manufacturers of products ranging from automobiles (di Benedetto 2012) to wines (Beverland, 2004) offer consumers several products under different brand names, but partly based on the same product components or architecture. However, while such platform branding practices have been increasingly adopted by companies and studied by marketing research, less is known about the consumer behavior implications of such branding. In particular, the few extant studies on the consumer behavior implications (e.g., Sullivan, 1998; Strach and Everett, 2006; Olson, 2008) do not take into account consumer heterogeneity, i.e., the potentially different behavior towards platform brands by different consumers. This issue is, in essence, the focus of the present study. Specifically, as the focal consumer trait, we concentrate on the role that consumers’ general cognitive ability, i.e. intelligence, may play in their choices of platform vs. independent brands. While intelligence has been shown to affect consumers’ financial decisions in the stock market (Grinblatt, Keloharju, & Linnainmaa, 2011, 2012), we are unaware of studies that would have directly examined the link between intelligence and brand choices in the product market. Our contribution is to report such an investigation with over 200,000 consumers’ purchase choices of cars in Finland. As the car brands studied differ in price points, higher-income individuals can, on the baseline, better afford the higher-premium platform brands (and, possibly, independent brands). Intelligence, in turn, correlates with income, possibly giving rise to a spurious, overall correlation between intelligence and higher-premium platform brands through income. Therefore, to study the ceteris paribus association between intelligence and brand choice, independent of income, we estimated an ANCOVA of the mean intelligence of individuals possessing cars of different brands, controlling for income and the other control variables. As to results, the least squares mean intelligence of individuals possessing higher-premium platform brands was lower (M = 5.55, s.e. = 0.01) than individuals possessing lower-premium platform brands (M = 5.64, s.e. = 0.01; pairwise comparison significant at p < .0001 level). Furthermore, the mean intelligence of independent, non-platform brand owners resulted even higher (M = 5.76, s.e. = 0.02) than that of the low-premium platform brand owners (M = 5.64, s.e. = 0.01; comparison significant at p < .0001 level). Ordered probit regression analysis of purchased brands, provided consistent results. In summary, the results support our hypotheses that controlling for income, greater intelligence is associated with the preference for lower-premium platform brands over higher-premium platform brands and, further, with the preference for independent platform brands over platform brands. Managerially, the results demonstrate that smarter consumers may have suspicions towards higher-priced platform brands. Correspondingly, such consumers may be more predisposed either to seek lower-priced brands of equal quality, or to pursue brands of independent posture. To attract these consumers to higher-premium platform brands, marketers may need to provide convincing information on which tangible quality aspects are distinctive in the products of the higher-premium platform brand, as opposed to the lower-premium brand that is based on the same platform. At the same time, the independent brands may face a harder marketing task among less smart consumers, who seem to have more trust in the larger platform constellations of brands.

This paper integrates scholarly work and industry practices in fashion design, marketing, and consumer behavior as the basis for presenting six principles of fashion design and marketing for sustainability and social change. Criteria for effective marketing strategies are offered.