Becoming hybrid in a digitalised world: A study of marketing professionals

A reminder that the 2022 KBS Spring Series continues Today at 1:00 pm with a seminar by Annmarie Ryan.  The seminar format is informal and interactive facilitating discussion and Q&A and will take place on MS Teams.  The title and abstract are below.  Click here to join the meeting

Becoming hybrid in a digitalised world: A study of marketing professionals

Digital technologies are spreading across the marketing discipline and are changing the way marketing gets done (see Brady et al., 2002; Erevelles et al 2016; Cluley 2016, Cluley et al., 2019). Technological tools in social media applications shape the practices of digital marketers (Royle & Lang, 2014) and allow them to manage the increasing consumer and market complexities. Digitalisation has thereby opened up completely new avenues in marketing that enable marketers to direct their resources towards the development of increasingly individualized solutions (Cluley & Brown, 2015). An interesting line of research is opening that focuses on the changing nature of marketing practices in data driven organisations and markets. For example, Cluley, Green and Owen (2019) describe the changing nature of the market researcher role and on successful strategies employed to exploit digital technologies that include roles played across both social scientist and storyteller. What however remains unclear, is how marketing professionals work to develop the necessary skills in the transition from traditional, strategy driven marketing to digital and data driven marketing, while also integrating social and technical capabilities, or how they manage to keep those worlds together. In this presentation this question will be addressed through the lens of hybridity. Drawing on 63 interviews with marketing professionals from a range of contexts (e.g., brand and agencies, multinationals, SMEs and start-ups) multiple sectors (pharmaceutical, hospitality, publishing, the arts), geographical settings (US, Ireland, India) and including those that identify as ‘marketer’ and those that identify as ‘digital marketer’, I consider new hybrid practices that emerge at the boundary between traditional and digital marketing and the effect that the Covid pandemic has played in accelerating digitalised ways of working in marketing. 

All are warmly welcome, further information on the KBS Spring series can be found at https://www.ul.ie/business/research/research-events