Outside-in marketing: Renaissance and future

Marketing is an applied discipline. As new generations of technology affecting marketing practice develop, marketing theories have to be re-visited, adjusted, and sometimes scrapped and replaced with new theory as new phenomenon emerge in the increasingly dynamic world of marketing practice. This technology-enabled aspect of why and how some firms may be more successful in becoming and maintaining strong O-I marketers is clearly worthy of scholarly exploration. This research commentary extends Quach et al.'s review paper that synthesizes and consolidates what is known as outside-in marketing, recognizes some key changes in relevant aspects of the business context, and extends thinking in new directions for outside-in marketing to consider important unanswered questions regarding the O-I construct and its relationship with other constructs and performance outcomes. For example, can O-I marketing activities such as leveraging customer data for segmentation and targeting be undertaken in more or less O-I ways? When and how might I-O marketing potentially lead to better firm performance outcomes? Should O-I marketing and performance relationship be hypothesized and tested in terms of O-I alone or O-I vs. I-O or O-I + I-O? How should firms measure O-I performance?