Call for paper: Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal (Marketing Work and Artificial Intelligence )

Marketing scholarship has traditionally emphasized prescribing how marketing should be managed rather than examining how it is actually practiced. Several scholars have highlighted a significant gap in our understanding of marketing work—that is, the everyday practices through which marketers perform and enact marketing. This gap has become even more pronounced in light of the transformations brought about by artificial intelligence. AI not only shapes contemporary consumption—from music and food to mobility services—but also profoundly reconfigures the ways marketing is conceived and executed. Against this backdrop, the aim of this special issue is to explore how marketing work is organized and performed within firms, and in particular, how it has evolved with the advent of AI.

Against the optimistic stance that sees human marketing work being made less focused on routine, boring tasks and more focused on enhanced (augmented) strategic planning and management thanks to AI, the expected contribution of the SI is also to debunk the risks associated with the use of AI. While the need for marketers to run focus groups and survey consumers is not going away, the actual nature of that work looks to be transformed as a result of AI – the particular soft skills needed to run focus groups well are unnecessary when the focus group is entirely synthetic. Certain areas of marketing work might therefore be becoming far more distant from the target audience than they have ever been – and what might it mean when the customer being oriented towards is synthetic rather than ‘real’? We expect qualitative research to answer this question.

Over the past five years, marketing research has increasingly examined how digitalization is transforming marketing work. Recent research has focused on digitalized marketing labor, showing how data analytics and coding reshape marketing organization, market research, and advertising and how the figure of the “digitalized marketer” is emerging, underscoring the growing interest in how marketers’ work evolves alongside digital technologies. Yet there is a need to move further and more urgently, as AI is now rapidly and profoundly reconfiguring marketing work. Several scholars strongly contest the idea of AI as simply an enabler of performance, optimization, and economic value creation, and instead urge researchers to treat AI as a social practice that affects individuals and society, while challenging narratives of technological neutrality that present AI as objective, autonomous, and morally neutral. From this perspective, AI is understood as producing consumption norms, ranking consumers, and shaping their behaviors.

For this special issue, we invite contributions employing a broad spectrum of qualitative research approaches—from ethnography to phenomenology and grounded theory—each offering distinctive insights into how organizations are currently practicing marketing with AI.

List of Topic Areas

Evolution of the profiles of marketing practitioners – those individuals who enact marketing practices – provoked by AI
Changes in the marketing practices – the organized activities that marketing practitioners routinely enact – caused by AI
How AI-mediated environments reshape consumer co-creation practices and customer experience dynamics, and the way marketers orchestrate them.
How marketing practices and practitioners are becoming more sustainable or not thanks to AI
Algorithmic marketing as a fundamentally normative practice: how algorithmic decisions shape the aftermath (consumers behaviour, vulnerability and isolation).

More specific themes connected to the way marketing practitioners use AI to conduct daily marketing work (challenges of interviewing with ai as interviewer or moderator; opportunities for connecting between multi-level datasets, etc.)

Submissions Information

Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Registration and access are available at: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/qmr

Author guidelines must be strictly followed. Please see: https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/journal/qmr#jlp_author_guidelines

Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to “Please select the issue you are submitting to”.

Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.