Editorial – What is an interactive marketing perspective and what are emerging research areas?

What is an interactive marketing perspective and whatare emerging research areas?Like most journals having specific scope and unique positioning, Journal of Research In Interactive Marketing aims to publish manuscripts with relevance to interactive marketing perspective.With the fast growing of reputations and impacts, JRIM has recently attracted a significantly higher number of submissions and consequently a higher reject rate.Quite a number of manuscripts submitted to the JRIM have been rejected or unsubmitted due to their not fitting to the theme of the journal.In a nutshell, interactive marketing, as one of the fastest growing fields in contemporary business world, is a multi-directional value creation and mutual-influence marketing process through active customer connection, engagement, participation and interaction (Wang, 2021(Wang, , 2023)).Platform-orchestrated multi-sided network interactions reshape the retail and advertising industry by prioritizing consumers' needs and source sharing through data-driven matchmaking.The process of value creation is rapidly shifting from the product-and firm-centric view to personalized and interactive customer experience.Accordingly, interactive marketing refers to a bilateral communication that emphasizes consumer active participation in the marketing process.While it has a relatively short history, emerged in the internet and digital age with a wide application of e-commerce (Deighton, 1996), interactive marketing discipline has dramatically expanded its scale and scope thanks to the newly developed technologies and social media platforms (Verma et al., 2023).As social media content is merging with online shopping, consumers are persistently browsing, exploring, sharing, and engaging with different forms of content, enhancing customer-brand engagement (Shen, 2023).Interactivity thus becomes an integral part of contemporary marketing practices from retailing, service, communication, to livestreaming and mobile marketing.Then what kind of research themes or manuscripts that we are looking for in the Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing?First, JRIM is seeking for manuscripts that advance new theoretical frameworks addressing emerging marketing phenomena or provide insightful guidelines to interactive marketing practices.Spearheaded by industry-wide marketing strategic applications under various interactive innovations, the advent of interactive marketing has witnessed the declining effectiveness of passive broadcast advertising and one-way persuasive communication.Despite dramatic changes in marketplaces, academic inquiry of the mechanisms of interactive marketing strategies has largely lagged behind industry innovation and market practices.Many submissions did not meet the JRIM publication standard due to their weak theoretical foundation or inadequate theoretical conceptualization.Essentially, a theory in marketing is a well-substantiated explanation of a business phenomenon that often incorporate laws, hypotheses and facts.We observed that some manuscripts tend to use seemingly omnipotent theories, such as stimulusorganism-response (SOR), the theory of planned behavior (TPB), and technology acceptance model (TAM) in all kinds of research topics without looking at their relevance or applicability.However, such studies often come up with a list of hypotheses based on those long-established principles to describe simple relationship between variables that are largely intuitive and common knowledge, but do not add much new or interesting insights beyond what we have known from existing literature (c.f., Wang, 2022).It is important to note that simply applying a widely used theoretical model may not be relevant or helpful to