Summary
Marketing is the discipline by which organisations analyse, create and deliver value to target audiences through the coordinated orchestration of products, pricing, distribution channels and communications. At its core lies an understanding of evolving consumer needs and preferences, garnered through both qualitative insights and quantitative analytics. Firms employ segmentation to identify distinctive customer groups, develop positioning strategies to differentiate offerings and manage the entire customer journey—from awareness and consideration to purchase and loyalty. Recent advances have seen the integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning into campaign optimisation, personalisation engines and dynamic pricing systems. Digital and social platforms now underpin real-time engagement, enabling two-way interactions and community-driven co-creation. Concurrently, ethical and regulatory concerns around data privacy, transparency and algorithmic bias have spurred research into responsible marketing practices. In an interconnected global economy, companies must balance local cultural nuances with consistent brand narratives, align stakeholder interests across complex supply networks and demonstrate measurable returns to both shareholders and society.
Research from Nature Portfolio
Studies of social-media influencers have elucidated how credibility traits—such as expertise, trustworthiness and authenticity—foster parasocial relationships, thereby enhancing perceived brand credibility and purchase intention. Research on beauty vloggers further shows that repeated, authentic interactions deepen follower trust, which in turn mediates the impact of influencer attributes on consumer behaviour. In the context of digital tourism, investigations into official destination websites reveal that cultural alignment (for example, collectivist values and high-context communication) combined with clear benevolent service cues significantly elevates tourist trust, offering empirical guidance on tailoring online content to cultural dimensions.
Topic trend for the past 5 years
The graph below shows the article count in Nature Index journals for marketing.
* The ‘Current Index’ represents data for a 12-month rolling window, the current window is 1 May 2025 - 30 April 2026.
Technical terms
Parasocial relationship: A one-sided emotional bond that a consumer forms with a media personality or influencer, which influences attitudes and purchase intentions.
Source credibility: The perceived expertise, trustworthiness and authenticity of a communicator, affecting message persuasiveness.
Dynamic pricing: The practice of continuously adjusting prices in response to real-time data on demand, inventory and competitive actions.
Price cannibalisation: The reduction in full-price sales of non-promoted items resulting from promotional uplift in related products.
Causal inference: Statistical methods used to estimate the effect of an intervention by distinguishing causation from mere correlation.
Generative AI: Artificial intelligence models—often transformer-based—that produce new content, such as images or text, for advertising creative.
Notable articles in marketing
- A computational reward learning account of social media engagement. Nature Communications (2021).
About these summaries
This Nature Research Intelligence Topic summary is created with the cited references and a large language model. We take care to ground generated text with facts, and have systems in place to gain human feedback on the overall quality of the process in line with our AI principles. We strive to create accurate and useful summaries for people unfamiliar with the research topic and that supports this goal. These pages are a beta release and will be updated as we learn how best to help people gain value from a research topic summary.
Research
Position of Marketing in Nature Index by Count
Leading institutions
| Institution | Count | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Yale University | 4 | 2.96 |
| Harvard University | 5 | 2.82 |
| Shanghai International Studies University (SISU) | 3 | 2.1 |
| Jiangnan University | 2 | 1.6 |
| National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) | 5 | 1.4 |
| Singapore Management University (SMU) | 2 | 1.25 |
| University of Michigan (U-M) | 3 | 1.23 |
| The University of Nottingham (UoN) | 2 | 1.2 |
| Northwestern University (NU) | 2 | 1.19 |
| University of Pennsylvania (Penn) | 3 | 1.16 |
Collaboration
Top 5 leading collaborators in Marketing
Collaborating institutions
Note: Hover over the bars to view details about each institution's Share.
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