The continuous development of technology makes marketing scholars and practitioners more dynamic and open to apply new approaches and make new investigations about digital marketing. One of these techniques, the VOSviewer science mapping, was used in this study. This technique is capable of processing thousands of data, as well as providing more systematic, comprehensive, and representative results. This study aims to review the field of digital marketing and reveal the themes under the field to make a comprehensive description of digital marketing so that marketing researchers and practitioners can quickly discover impactful and/or under-developed themes in the field. Thirteen thousand nine hundred ninety-four articles published about digital marketing since 1974 were analysed through the VOSviewer software program. A digital marketing map was created consisting of four topic clusters and three visualization styles. In this way, a visual inference was made about the current state of digital marketing, and its current situation was also discussed.
TopBackground
With the usage of the Internet in commercial activities, digitalization has increasingly become one of the critical terms both in consumers’ daily lives and in the business world. In the digital age (Goodwin, 2011), many “digitalized” concepts such as ‘digital communication’ (e.g., Simon and Alouini, 2005), ‘digital economy’ (e.g., Tapscott, 1996), ‘digital leadership’ (e.g., Sheninger, 2014), ‘digital products and services’ (e.g., Schulz et al., 2019), ‘digital technologies’ (e.g., Roose et al., 2005), and the effects of these concepts in different fields are discussed. To see the gaps and popular topics about which many studies have been conducted or topics in which there is little interest, in the literature on digitalization, recognising the field can be a contributing approach for the related disciplines. This approach has also critical importance for making the literature of consumption, consumer behaviour, and marketing more “digital”. With the development of digital technologies, the behaviours of consumers such as information searching, pre-purchase evaluations, purchasing, post-purchase evaluations have been reshaped (Mahajan & Venkatesh, 2000; Häubl & Trifts, 2000; Teo & Yeong, 2003; Quinn et al., 2016).