Use of the Internet of Things in marketing

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the key technologies for the digital transformation of both business and society. The paper primarily aims to investigate the structure and dynamics of academic publications in English dealing with issues of IoT development – from a marketing perspective, using methods of systematic mapping, i.e., co-citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, and analysis of the co-occurrence of keywords in the Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) databases. Analysis of research papers enables the identification of the most influential articles, papers, and journals, as well as visualization of the keywords and co-authorship co-occurrences. There has been an exponential increase in studies on IoT applications in marketing, indexed in Scopus and WoS citation databases. An insight into analyzed papers shows that companies utilize large amounts of data generated by the IoT to gain insights into customers’ supply and value creation, which helps strengthen their relationships with customers and pursue more efficient marketing policies and practices, ultimately leading to a competitive advantage. The IoT is expected to evolve into a vast network that includes smart devices and significantly influences people’s behavior, especially decision-making at different stages of the purchasing process.