Popular Research Topics in Marketing Journals, 1995–2014

During the past two decades, the focus of marketing has moved from the tactics of persuasion to the strategies of value cocreation. After moving toward cognitive science and corporate strategies in the early 2000s, marketing research returned to its traditional domains of consumer psychologies and customer management. While conscientious consumers are gradually restraining themselves from selfish indulgence, marketers have refocused on a new set of values that encompass mental, experiential, and societal well-being. In this regard, we adopt an unprecedented approach by incorporating topic modeling with social network analysis. The results show that, in terms of topic heterogeneity, the most impactful journals are the most diverse, whereas each runner-up has a unique focus. Among the journals, we detect two major co-authorship communities, and among the topics, we detect three. Further, we find that the communities of the most cited papers are composed of heterogeneous clusters of similar topics. The pivots within, and the bridges between, these communities are also reported. In the spirit of collaborative research, our topic model and network analysis are shared via online collaboration and visualization platforms that readers can use to explore our models interactively and to download the dataset for further studies.