Marketing Management

Marketing management is the strategic discipline by which organisations create, communicate, deliver and steward value for customers, partners and society. It embraces the end-to-end process of understanding evolving consumer needs, shaping offerings and orchestrating the four fundamental levers—product, price, place and promotion—to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. Modern marketing management relies on data-driven insights and cross-functional collaboration to design and refine products or services, set appropriate pricing, develop efficient distribution channels and craft coherent communication strategies. Beyond unilateral campaigns, it cultivates enduring relationships through trust, co-creation and personalised engagement, while remaining vigilant to societal concerns such as ethics, transparency and environmental impact. Practitioners deploy quantitative analytics alongside qualitative research to anticipate shifts in consumer behaviour, monitor technological innovations and adapt to regulatory changes. In a globalised, digitised marketplace, marketing management must integrate brand stewardship, customer experience and stakeholder accountability to foster long-term loyalty, drive advocacy and advance both corporate performance and social welfare.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent work has modelled the formation of continuous user trust in digital platforms, identifying how perceived ease of use, privacy assurance, security features and organisational reputation jointly predict sustained engagement with mobile applications. This structural framework emphasises the interplay of technological, institutional and experiential factors in retaining frequent users beyond initial adoption. In the agro-sphere, analysis of organic-brand loyalty and price-premium structures has shown that consumer attachment to eco-labelled products exceeds that of conventional brands, and that the magnitude of a green premium is determined by loyalty levels, certification clarity, advertising investment and average industry profitability. These findings offer empirical guidance on calibrating green branding strategies to consumer preferences and market conditions. Foundational network-science research has demonstrated that within collaborative innovation networks members occupy originator or revisor roles according to their position in cooperation structures, with peripheral participants driving idea generation and core actors shaping quality through iterative refinement. This segmentation of roles illuminates how marketing-oriented firms might organise co-creative activities to optimise both novelty and execution.

Research from all publishers

Studies of inter-firm relationship marketing in service industries have used structural equation modelling to show that trust, commitment and perceived switching costs are primary antecedents of satisfaction. High satisfaction in turn fosters joint value co-creation and enhanced ICT coordination, reinforcing continuity in supplier-firm alliances. In digital customer-relationship settings, research into mobile-CRM platforms reveals that perceived ease of use and usefulness not only drive adoption but also mediate the link between technology acceptance and post-purchase repurchase intentions. These insights point to the vital role of platform usability in relationship marketing and customer retention strategies. On the consumer side, investigations into livestream e-commerce show that social and structural relationship bonds significantly elevate cumulative satisfaction, which then predicts continuance intention. Affective commitment further moderates this effect, underlining the importance of emotional engagement alongside functional incentives in sustaining loyalty within fast-moving online retail contexts.

Marketing Management publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in marketing management across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Value co-creation: Collaborative processes in which firms and customers jointly combine resources, ideas or efforts to enhance products, services and experiences.

Customer-relationship management (CRM): A set of practices and technologies that firms use to manage and analyse interactions with current and potential customers, aiming to improve retention and satisfaction.

Structural equation modelling: A statistical technique that assesses complex cause-and-effect relationships among observed and latent variables in a hypothesised model.

Green premium: The additional price consumers are willing to pay for products bearing environmental or sustainability credentials compared with conventional alternatives.

Perceived ease of use: The degree to which a user believes that interacting with a system or application will require minimal effort, influencing adoption and continued use.

References

1. Investigating customers’ continuous trust towards mobile banking apps. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2023).
2. Agro-sphere determinants of green branding: eco-consumption, loyalty, and price premium. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2022).
3. Cooperation patterns of members in networks during co-creation. Scientific Reports (2021).
4. Managing relationships between tourism companies and their suppliers: An approach beyond classical variables. Investigaciones Europeas de Dirección y Economía de la Empresa (2023).
5. Mobile-customer relationship management and its effect on post-purchase behavior: The moderating of perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness. International Journal of Data and Network Science (2022).
6. Accessing the Influence of User Relationship Bonds on Continuance Intention in Livestream E-Commerce. Sustainability (2022).
7. An Overview of Marketing.