Guest editorial

Abstract

New roles of social media in the marketplace call for new strategic approaches in marketing Today, the fact that firms and customers are interacting in new, more complex and multifaceted ways through social media is neither surprising nor novel. It is in fact the norm, a thing that is expected and a component that is advocated to be an integral part of any comprehensive marketing effort. The exponentially growing popularity of digital platforms has indeed generated a social media tsunami (Sheth, 2020) that has flooded the Indian marketplace, as an example, with 326.1 m users in 2018, and with a pre-COVID estimation of 447.9 m users in 2023 [1].The term social media encompasses many platforms that allow users-consumers-to build networks and share all sorts of information, opinions and feelings in a dynamic and egalitarian way (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010;Peters et al., 2013). According to Li et al. (2021), the emergence and growth of social media triggered three important changes in the marketplace. First, firms and customers are now connected, and they interact in ways that were previously inconceivable. For example, many companies have partially or fully migrated their customer services to social media platforms in order to capitalize on the realtime interaction and to take advantage of the greater flexibility offered by these platforms (Gunarathne et al., 2018). And yet, the ever-changing and unpredictable "future" has barely revealed itself-a host of technological advances like virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) will foster newer forms of interaction that are likely to play significant roles in how social media networks are created and used by both consumers and marketers alike. The capability of VR to allow consumers to shop in a virtual, social environment with friends and relatives located in different locations through VR systems (Meißner et al., 2020), the development of social AR technologies (De Ruyter et al., 2020), and the Internet of things (Appel et al., 2020) pose new challenges for marketers and social media strategists. Consumers of tomorrow will experience a world in which social media will influence, and quite dramatically change, an even wider range of human activities. We can expect that the rapidly decreasing online/offline dichotomy will eventually simply fade away (Appel et al., 2020). Sharma and Joshi (2021), the first article included in this special issue, reflects on the marketing implications of a relatively recent technological development: mobile coupons (M-coupons). M-coupons offer some obvious advantages for both marketers and consumers. For consumers, it offers convenience and easy accessibility-no clipping, saving, or remembering to carry them with you. For advertisers too it offers cost savings and an easy way to distribute to select audiences. Indeed, as the authors highlight, it has been reported that redemption rates of M-coupons exceed that of traditional coupons delivered via print media, and it is projected that the gap between traditional coupon redemption and...