Artificial Intelligence: The next disrupting technology of Online Marketing
Lately, notable changes are occurring in the field of online marketing: customers demand ever greater customer experiences when passing through the purchasing journey. Concepts such as hyper personalization, speed, and convenience are gaining enormous attention. With traditional online marketing techniques, businesses are lacking capabilities to tackle these emerging challenges. Advancements in AI marketing applications are now paving the way for businesses to deliver an immersive experience to their customers. Although most business executives acknowledge these developments, a deeper understanding of how exactly AI can facilitate this process is lacking. This knowledge gap is underlined by the identified research gap: there is barely any scientific literature that gives a comprehensive overview of how various AI marketing applications can be used to improve the online customer experience across the entire consumer journey. The objective of this research is to provide such a complete overview. To do so, a literature review is conducted to determine relevant factors of the customer experience and to explore the different stages of the online consumer journey. Next, research papers studying the effects of selected AI marketing applications on the identified factors were reviewed. Lastly, an expert interview was conducted, which provided additional practical insights. This research paper has been finalized with relevant theoretical and managerial implications.