Bridging the Theory and Practice of Digital Marketing from Interactive Marketing Perspective: A Historical Review

Abstract

The most noticeable impact on interactive marketing was the evolution of digital channels. In the domain of contemporary interactive marketing, digital marketing is a remarkable area with its specific focus on interactivity. Focusing on the digital marketing domain as a subset of interactive marketing, this chapter first synthesizes the literature on digital marketing to provide a comprehensive review of the domain. At the same time, it aims to identify the dominant themes of five eras by reviewing 30 years (1990-2020) of research divided into five distinct periods. Then, it investigates the connection between practical and theoretical focuses of the digital marketing research domain while comparing the practical and theoretical evolvement in each era. The analysis reveals that digital marketing has evolved from business-oriented to consumer-oriented. In addition, theory and practice followed each other very closely and acted as triggers for each other in different periods. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the dominant themes of the last era to shed light on future research and give an insight into what is ahead in digital marketing. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023.