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 OI 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 OI construct and its relationship with other constructs and performance outcomes. For example, can OI marketing activities such as leveraging customer data for segmentation and targeting be undertaken in more or less OI ways? When and how might IO marketing potentially lead to better firm performance outcomes? Should OI marketing and performance relationship be hypothesized and tested in terms of OI alone or OI vs. IO or O-I + I-O? How should firms measure OI performance?