Analyzing the Global Trend of Marketing 4.0 Researches: A Mixed-methods Approach

Today, 4.0 marketing is a strategic phenomenon that has received a lot of attention from managers due to its significant impact on corporate performance. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify the most productive countries, authors, sources, important keywords, and the time trends of their publication in the field of 4.0 marketing. It also aims to identify applications of the latest trends. The present study has used a mixed-methods approach (quantitative-qualitative) to achieve the research goal. First, in the quantitative part, a bibliometric analysis with data related to marketing 4.0 is performed. The data were collected from the Scopus database from 2011 (Industry 4.0) to 2021 and were analyzed using VOSviewer software. Then, in the qualitative part, the applications of artificial intelligence in marketing were identified as the latest trend emerging through a systematic literature review. Based on the findings of the first part, the time trend refers to three periods of social media marketing, digital marketing, and marketing based on artificial intelligence. In the second part, the applications of artificial intelligence in marketing were identified and categorized into nine concepts of location, price, promotion, product, employees, service, sales, customer, and decision making. Considering the increasing attention of researchers and managers around the world to the development of the transformational technologies of industry 4.0 in marketing activities, which is called Marketing 4.0, this research could identify emerging and growing trends in this field to pave the way for researchers to conduct more applied studies and the success of marketing managers in using the latest trends in this field.