Journal of Marketing Management

ISSN: 0267-257X (Print) 1472-1376 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjmm20

The Internet of Things (IoT) and marketing: the

state of play, future trends and the implications
for marketing

Bang Nguyen & Lyndon Simkin

To cite this article: Bang Nguyen & Lyndon Simkin (2017) The Internet of Things (IoT) and
marketing: the state of play, future trends and the implications for marketing, Journal of Marketing
Management, 33:1-2, 1-6, DOI: 10.1080/0267257X.2016.1257542

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2016.1257542

Published online: 06 Jan 2017.

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JOURNAL OF MARKETING MANAGEMENT, 2017
VOL. 33, NOS. 1–2, 1–6
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2016.1257542

EDITORIAL

The Internet of Things (IoT) and marketing: the state of play,

future trends and the implications for marketing

A revolution is happening via the Internet of Things (IoT) – one that will have tremen-
dous impact on the world as we know it. The IoT, which involves interconnected devices,
systems and services that rely on the autonomous communication of physical objects
within the existing Internet infrastructure (e.g., Atzori, Iera, & Morabito, 2010), is a
thrilling concept because it brings intelligence of the Internet to physical products
(Hoffman & Novak, 2015), thereby making all products more connected and smart
(Nguyen & De Cremer, 2016). The applications of the IoT span numerous areas, such
as wearables, smart homes, smart cities, industrial automation and many more (e.g.,
Chuah et al., 2016). The IoT provides great benefits to numerous industries and society
as a whole (Bi, Xu, & Wang, 2014), with applications such as heart-monitoring implants,
automobiles with built-in sensors, biochip transponders on farm animals, search and
rescue devices, or smart thermostat systems and washer/dryers that utilise Wi-Fi for
remote monitoring (Kortuem et al., 2009; Porter & Heppelmann, 2014). Many of the IoT
systems and technologies are novel and the IoT is expected to usher in automation in
nearly all fields (e.g., Dholakia & Reyes, 2013). According to Gartner (2015), there will be
nearly 20 billion devices on the IoT by 2020.
With such rapid expansion and spread of its impact, it is surprising that few marketing
studies exploring the IoT have been conducted. There are still many untapped applica-
tion areas, numerous challenges and issues that need to be improved, and the full
impact for stakeholder groups is far from clearly charted. There are implications for how
marketing may effectively embrace the IoT and how the IoT might itself shape market-
ing. The IoT has been proclaimed as essential for organisational innovation, adaptation
and success, especially for firms with high amounts of connectivity, network and data
(Jones, Suoranta, & Rowley, 2013; Yu, Nguyen, & Chen, 2016). However, more research is
needed to explore the capabilities needed to adopt the IoT in the organisation and how
these relate to different aspects of marketing, particularly for the relationship-oriented
organisation that engages in CRM, alliances, joint ventures and partnerships. Many of
the rules of marketing are changing and many new approaches will be introduced in
this new IoT era.
This special issue of JMM focuses on the latest thinking and research in the IoT in the
context of marketing, reflecting the enhanced interconnected world, exploring the
implications for the marketing discipline. The aim is to provide the latest and most
innovative contributions concerning the IoT and marketing solutions, involving inter-
connected smart things and inter-operation, with the objective of enhancing customer–
firm relationships, providing strategic capabilities or improving integrated marketing
systems. The topics presented here are varied and include value co-creation, adoption
and use of wearables, interaction style and consumer resistance to smart products,

© 2017 Westburn Publishers Ltd.

2 EDITORIAL

among others. The special issue includes state-of-the-art marketing research in the IoT
context, and in doing so, extends the literature to a setting that has both practical and
theoretical importance. We publish four full papers and four commentaries in this
special issue, covering specific issues related to both consumer and industrial IoT, as
follows.
The first paper, by Balaji and Kumar, entitled ‘Value co-creation with internet-of-
things technology in the retail industry’, investigates the way in which the IoT changes
the customers‘ experience when shopping in a retailing context. Drawing on the service-
dominant logic, their study proposes that customer interaction with IoT retail technol-
ogy results in value co-creation, revealing that ease of use, superior functionality,
aesthetic appeal and presence are key determinants of value co-creation for IoT retail
technology. The authors show that value co-creation influences customers’ continuance
intentions and word-of-mouth intentions. These findings are of particular relevance for
retailers in delivering superior customer experience and the authors present managerial
implications and discuss research directions for future developments.
The second paper, entitled ‘Exploring the factors that support adoption and sustained
use of health and fitness wearables’, written by Canhoto and Arp, advances current
knowledge on the conceptual understanding of consumers’ adoption and sustained use
of wearable technology for general health and fitness purposes. The authors note that
the IoT and, particularly, wearable products have changed the focus of the healthcare
industry to prevention programmes that enable people to become active and take
responsibility for their own health. However, these benefits will only materialise if
users adopt and continue to use these products, as opposed to abandoning them
shortly after purchase. Their study investigates how the characteristics of the device,
the context and the user can support the adoption and the sustained use of health and
fitness wearables, finding that the factors that support the former differ from those that
support the latter. For instance, features that signal the device’s ability to collect activity
data are essential for adoption, whereas device portability and resilience are key for
sustained use. Overall, the findings provide valuable guidance to firms investing in the
development and marketing of these devices, as well as key insights for government
initiatives aimed at combating rising levels of obesity and diabetes.
The paper entitled ‘The internet of things and interaction style: the effect of smart
interaction and brand attachment’, by Wu, Chen, and Dou, develops and examines the
effect of two different interaction styles (e.g., friend-like and engineer-like communica-
tion) on consumers’ brand perception using two laboratory experiments. Their study
suggests that a smart interaction style in the Internet of Things (IoT) context can
improve consumers’ perceptions of brand warmth and brand competence, and that
these perceptions enhance the consumers’ emotional attachment to the brand.
Specifically, the results indicate that a friend-like interaction style (1) produces more
positive brand warmth than the engineer-like style, (2) enhances brand competence as
much as the engineer-like style does, and (3) has a positive effect on users’ brand
attachment, which (4) is mediated by brand warmth and brand competence.
Furthermore, (5) the style of smart interaction and brand positioning has interaction
effects on brand warmth, brand competence and ultimately brand attachment. The
authors advance our current understanding of the stereotype content model,
 JOURNAL OF MARKETING MANAGEMENT 3

contributing to the brand attachment literature, and providing insights into how com-
panies can better construct their brand equity through the use of IoT technologies.
The fourth paper, entitled ‘Drivers of consumers’ resistance to smart products’, by
Mani and Chouk, develops a better understanding of the reasons underlying consumer
resistance to smart and connected products. The authors note that the continued
growth of the IoT raises significant challenges (security, privacy, trust, etc.) (Sicari,
Rizzardi, Grieco, & Coen-Porisini, 2015) and ethical issues (Nguyen & De Cremer, 2016).
Thus, concerns about information privacy (Hsu & Lin, 2016) and identified potential
problems ‘related to data protection, lack of human control, and enslavement to devices’
(Slettemeås, 2009, p. 226), as well as increasing numbers of gadgets being added to the
IoT ecosystem question the utility and added value of these innovations. To this end, the
study was carried out to understand resistance towards smart watches, finding that
perceived uselessness, perceived price, intrusiveness, perceived novelty and self-efficacy
have an impact on consumer resistance to smart products. Moreover, privacy concerns
have an effect on intrusiveness and dependence impacts privacy concerns. The study
thus contributes to a better understanding of the factors that explain consumer resis-
tance to smart products by examining original variables that have not been studied
previously in the resistance literature, such as privacy, intrusiveness, perceived novelty
and dependence, here in the IoT context.
Following the full papers, we also have the pleasure of presenting four commentaries
about the IoT from highly respectable marketing scholars.
The first commentary paper, entitled ‘Vignettes in the two-step arrival of the internet
of things and its reshaping of marketing management’s service-dominant logic’, by
Woodside and Sood, proposes substantial revisions in the service-dominant logic due
to the upcoming takeoff stage of adopting radically new IoT innovations. The authors
offer vignettes on the introductions of the IoT and their impacts on revising the service-
dominant logic paradigm in marketing. They note that except for smartphones, most
consumer households are not participating now in the IoT revolution – but most
product-service radical innovations include a 20+-year low-growth start-up. However,
because the benefits really are enormous and the technical advances in smart devices
are now rapidly improving, they expect the IoT revolution to hit hard in all areas of daily
life before 2025, similar to the great impacts occurring now in business-to-business
applications.
The second commentary paper, by Ehret and Wirtz, entitled ‘Unlocking value from
machines: business models and the industrial internet of things’, argues that the
Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) offers new opportunities and harbours threats that
companies are not able to address with existing business models. The authors use
Entrepreneurship and Transaction Cost Theories to explore the conditions for designing
non-ownership business models for the emerging IIoT with its implications for sharing
uncertain opportunities and downsides, and for transforming these uncertainties into
business opportunities. Non-ownership contracts are introduced as the basis for busi-
ness model design and are proposed as an architecture for the productive sharing of
uncertainties in IIoT manufacturing networks. The authors identify the following three
main types of IIoT-enabled business models: (1) provision of manufacturing assets,
maintenance and repair, and their operation, (2) innovative information and analytical
services that help manufacturing (e.g., based on artificial intelligence, big data and
4 EDITORIAL

analytics), and (3) new services targeted at end-users (e.g., offering efficient customisa-
tion by integrating end-users into the manufacturing and supply chain ecosystem).
Next, the commentary paper, entitled ‘The internet of total corporate communica-
tions, quaternary corporate communications and the corporate marketing internet
revolution’, written by Balmer and Yen, suggests the advent of what they call, ‘The
Corporate Marketing Internet Revolution’, which necessitates a radical rethinking of
marketing practice and scholarship. They emphasise the mindful of the importance of
the Internet, and in particular, the IoT phenomena, and formally introduce and elucidate
the Internet of Total Corporate Communications (IoTCC) notion. Moreover, the authors
particularise the nature and importance of quaternary (fourth-order) total corporate
communications, which, to date, the total corporate communications effects of the
Corporate Internet Marketing Revolution have not been accorded importance in the
extant. As such, their article seeks to address this omission, discussing what they are and
their impacts.
The final paper, entitled ‘The integrity challenge of the internet-of-things (IoT): on
understanding its dark side’, by De Cremer, Nguyen, and Simkin, considers the
influence of the IoT on marketing practices and addresses the overlooked area of
the dark side of the IoT. The authors note that dysfunctional forms of IoT have been
neglected as an area of research, so identifying the different types of IoT providers’
dark side behaviours will assist in the development of an integrated approach to the
IoT that will help overcome or mitigate these dark side behaviours. Based on an
extensive literature review, supplemented by expert insights drawn from the authors’
study of the IoT, they develop a framework that classifies the varying IoT dark side
behaviour types. The framework reveals eight forms of dark side behaviour that are
grouped into four broad categories. This classification illustrates how different types
of dark side behaviours are linked to key strategic IoT processes and also outlines
how these dark side practices may be addressed by adopting a more strategic and
integrity-oriented approach. It is concluded that with the adoption of a more holistic
approach to the IoT, dark side behaviours can be addressed and move in the
direction of more effective marketing practices.
We hope the papers in this special issue will encourage further discussion and debate
in this interesting research field, linking IoT with marketing studies. This special issue
focuses around strong theoretical, methodological and managerial aspects of marketing
processes, thereby giving it a long-term vision for the IoT in marketing. However, much
more work is needed to understand the implications of IoT further. With the thought of
extending the scope of the papers presented here, we encourage future studies to
examine these ‘IoT marketing’ issues more broadly, with more original empirical, beha-
vioural, analytical or managerial work, for example, by studying the following.

● How should firms develop fully integrated IoT channel and communication strate-
gies to best reflect the wide variety of the IoT options? How should IoT firms
evaluate the consistency of messages across multiple touch points? How can
marketing effectiveness be measured in an integrated IoT communications system?
● How much control do firms have over their customers in this environment? How
much control should they exert over their customers with so much available data?
 JOURNAL OF MARKETING MANAGEMENT 5

● What is the relationship between CRM and the IoT in such a data-driven
environment?
● How should firms develop relationships, alliances and partnerships in an IoT
environment?
● What factors affect consumer’s engagement with firms? How can firms use the IoT
to design and develop a better customer experience?
● What are the optimal metrics and marketing strategies that firms should employ
with the IoT?
● How are customised ads, promotions and other communications processed by
consumers via the IoT as compared to traditional counterparts?
● What are the costs and benefits of firms adopting the IoT to optimise marketing?

We would like to thank the Editor of Journal of Marketing Management, for providing
us with an excellent platform for presenting these research studies. We sincerely hope
you will enjoy reading these papers and to develop these ideas further.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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Bang Nguyen
East China University of Science Technology

Lyndon Simkin
Coventry University