Marketing Intelligence: Boom or Bust of Service Marketing?

Abstract

Marketing intelligence fosters two major developments within digital service marketing. On the one hand, a boom of services seems to have evolved, accelerated by the opportunities of marketing intelligence. It has contributed to the optimization of customer experiences, e.g., supported by mobile, personalized, and customized marketing services. On the other hand, (digital) self-services are likely to pervert the term “service”. Lifecycle marketing, including annoying marketing communication in real-time, automated price adjustment and programmatic advertising based on artificial intelligence, affects the vision of fully standardized marketing automation. Additionally, there are incentives to pollute the digital information in order to manufacture opinions. Fake news is one popular example. This leads to the (open) question if marketing intelligence means service boom or bust of marketing. This contribution aims to elaborate the boom-and-bust aspects of marketing intelligence and suggests a trade-off. The method applied in this paper will be a descriptive and conceptual literature review, through which the paradigmatic thoughts will be juxtaposed from the perspective of service.