On Research Methods in Interactive Marketing

After six generousandproductive years, Ed Malthousehasre-tiredasco-editorofthe JournalofInteractiveMarketing .Itisclearthat the journal has benefited immensely from Ed's stewardship.The Direct Marketing Educational Foundation, which sponsorsthe journal, and many others join me in expressing sincere grati-tude to him. I am personally grateful to have worked with himfor these past two years and I will miss him in his role. I learneda tremendous amount, both about being a journal editor andabout interactive marketing. I am very pleased with the directionthat he and the previous editors of JIM have taken the journalandtheaimsandscopeofJIMwillstayessentiallythesameasin-dicated in Malthouse and Hofacker (2010).One time when discussing the philosophy of the Journal, Edsaid that the Journal of Interactive Marketing was “methodo-logically agnostic.” Now this is not merely a clever turn ofthe phrase. A look at the table of contents of the Journal thenand now confirms this judgment and demonstrates a variedand resourceful use of many quantitative and qualitative tech-niques.OfcoursethevastmajorityofsubmissionstotheJour-nal consist of structural equation models (SEM) executed onsurvey data. One could hardly be surprised at this sinceSEM is the dominant methodological paradigm in academicmarketing. Despite this dominance, I thought that I woulduse this editorial opportunity to elaborate on agnosticism,and on research methods in interactive marketing.The End of the Great DifficultyOnceuponatime,longbeforetheinventionofelectronicin-teractive media, a very small subset of firms interacted withcustomers. These rare firms used the newly developing mailsystems in the United States and the United Kingdom to re-motely provide retail service to millions of people. Aftermanydecadesthetelephonewasaddedtothemix.Thesedirectmarketing firms, and those who studied them, made importantprogress in managing customer relationships. Meanwhile nu-merous other firms, firms that manufactured goods, could notseeortouchtheircustomersexcept with much difficulty andexpense. Data were difficult and expensive to collect forthese manufacturers. Since the economy was dominated bymanufacturing, a host of minds, many in academic marketingdepartments, worked to overcome The Great Difficulty ofToo Little Data. Numerous techniques were implemented toget around The Great Difficulty, many of them borrowedfromsocialpsychology.Pencilandpaperwereusedtocareful-ly coax data from the consumer.Purchase intention scales andother instruments were developed. Scenarios were used in thehope that research subjects could imagine what they mightfeel, think or do in hypothetical situations. Advertising re-sponse was estimated using purchase intention, unless thefirm was gigantic or willing to pay a lot of money for data.Now we come to a key goal of this editorial, which is to of-ficially proclaim that the era encompassing The Great Difficul-ty is over. By this proclamation I hope merely to further JIM'sgoal of publishing leading edge articles in direct and interactivemarketing. New direct distribution and communication channelsareappearingalmostmonthly.Todaytherearelaptops,netbooks,smart phones, tablets, e-readers and interactive games and toys.And I almost forgot, desktop computers. On top of that, eachyearasmallerportionoftheeconomyisdedicatedtomanufactur-ing. On the other hand, the portion dedicated to service, whichoften involves direct contact of some kind between the firm andits customers, is growing.So in my mind at least, The Great Difficulty of Too LittleData has been more than overcome. In fact The Great Difficultyhas been washed away down rivers of data, drowned as it were.Data are created and stored when we visit a Web site, when webuy, when we are exposed to an ad, when we click, when wemessage. More data are created when we simply move abouttown, or when we play games. Even little family businesseswith the odd, occasional Web visitor can generate megabytesof the stuff each month. And social networks? My how people