Marketing Research That Matters: The Studies Shaping Practice in 2024 and 2025
Marketing has never been short on confident advice. What it lacks, often, is proof. Over the past two years some of the most rigorous minds in the field have tested ideas that the industry usually takes on faith, and several of their findings cut against the intuition that drives everyday campaigns. This is a tour of that work: the studies from 2024 and 2025 that practitioners should know, the researchers behind them, and why peer-reviewed science deserves a seat in the marketing room.
Each study below is real, published in a leading journal and credited to its authors. The aim is not to turn marketers into academics. It is to show how a few well-designed studies can sharpen decisions that budgets and brands depend on.
Why Academic Research Belongs in the Marketing Room
Practitioner content moves fast and sounds certain. Academic research moves slowly and earns its certainty. That trade is the point. A platform white paper has every reason to flatter its own channel, while a peer-reviewed study has to survive review, replication and the scrutiny of rival scholars before it can claim an effect is real. The result is a body of knowledge that outlasts any single algorithm update.
The studies that follow make the case better than any argument. Some of their findings are genuinely counterintuitive, the kind of insight you would never reach from a dashboard or a gut call. The American Marketing Association even gives an annual award, the H. Paul Root Award, to the article that most advances the practice of marketing, a signal that the field is building the bridge from both sides. The job of the marketer is to read these studies for the mechanism, not just the headline, then test the idea inside their own context.
The AI Turn in Marketing Scholarship
No theme has dominated recent research like artificial intelligence. Three studies stand out, one on how consumers feel about AI, one on how AI changes the research process itself, and one on AI in customer care.
Journal of Marketing · 2025
Lower AI Literacy Predicts Greater AI Receptivity
Stephanie M. Tully, Chiara Longoni and Gil Appel
Across surveys, cross-country data and a series of further studies, the authors found a pattern that surprises most people. Consumers with lower AI literacy tend to be more receptive to adopting AI, not less. The reason is emotional rather than rational. People who understand AI less are more likely to see it as magical and to feel a sense of awe when it performs tasks that seem to require human qualities. Notably, efforts to demystify AI can reduce its appeal.
Why it matters for practice: How you talk about an AI feature shapes who adopts it. For broad consumer audiences, leaning fully into technical explanation can flatten the wonder that drives uptake. Segment the message. Educate where trust demands it, and preserve a sense of ease and capability where awe drives adoption.
Journal of Marketing · 2025 · H. Paul Root Award
AI-Human Hybrids for Marketing Research
Neeraj Arora, Ishita Chakraborty and Yohei Nishimura
The team asked whether large language models can act as genuine research collaborators rather than simple tools. Their answer is that a human-LLM hybrid beats either humans alone or AI alone. Language models can build sample profiles, generate synthetic respondents, run and moderate in-depth interviews and help surface themes, while human judgment keeps the work valid and grounded. The study won the 2025 H. Paul Root Award for its contribution to the practice of marketing.
Why it matters for practice: Insight work no longer has to choose between speed and depth. A small team can prototype personas, pressure-test concepts and explore audiences quickly, as long as a human owns the design and the interpretation. The hybrid, not the handoff, is the unit of value.
Journal of Marketing · 2024
The Caring Machine: Feeling AI for Customer Care
Ming-Hui Huang and Roland T. Rust
Drawing on interviews with senior managers and a survey of chief marketing officers, Huang and Rust map an AI-enabled customer care journey built on what they call feeling AI. It moves from accurate emotion recognition to empathetic response, then emotional management support and finally an emotional connection with the customer. The work bridges marketing and computer science to define what each stage requires.
Why it matters for practice: Generative AI in service is not only about deflecting tickets. The frontier is emotional: recognizing how a customer feels and responding with real empathy. Brands that design care around emotion, not just resolution, build the relationships that retention depends on.
Measurement and Media
As budgets shift toward retail media, one award-winning study reframes how its value should be measured.
Journal of Interactive Marketing · 2024 · Best Paper Award
Amplifying Off-Site Purchases with On-Site Retail Media Advertising
German Zenetti and Koen Pauwels
Retail media is usually judged by the sales that happen on the platform where the ad runs. Zenetti and Pauwels show the effect reaches further. On-site retail media advertising can lift purchases that happen off the platform, so measuring only on-site conversions understates the true return. The paper won the 2024 Journal of Interactive Marketing Best Paper Award.
Why it matters for practice: Judge retail media by on-platform last-click sales alone and you will undervalue it and misallocate budget. Build measurement that captures spillover to other channels. That is the incrementality lens that separates real return from reported return.
Inclusion, Power and Sustainability
Beyond AI and media, two studies push the field on who marketing serves and how sustainability actually plays out in competitive markets.
Journal of Marketing · 2024 · Hunt/Maynard Award
Intersectionality in Marketing: A Paradigm for Understanding Understudied Consumers
Esther Uduehi, Julian K. Saint Clair and Rowena Crabbe
The authors argue that intersectionality, the idea that overlapping identities such as gender, race and class shape lived experience, is still underused in marketing. They offer a paradigm, a research design roadmap and a clear agenda for studying consumers whose experiences sit at these intersections rather than in single, isolated categories. The article won the 2025 Hunt/Maynard Award for its contribution to marketing theory.
Why it matters for practice: Audiences are not single-axis. Treating women or young consumers as uniform segments misses how overlapping identities shape what people need and trust. For brands across diverse markets, including the Middle East, intersectional thinking sharpens segmentation and makes inclusion substantive rather than cosmetic.
Marketing Science · 2025
Sustainable Consumption: A Strategic Analysis
Wilfred Amaldoss and Siddharth Prusty
In a formal modeling study, Amaldoss and Prusty examine the strategic dynamics of sustainable consumption, analyzing how competition and firm incentives shape sustainable choices in the market. The work treats sustainability as a question of strategy and market structure, not only of messaging.
Why it matters for practice: Sustainable positioning is a competitive decision, not a slogan. Whether it pays off depends on market structure and what rivals do. Brands that treat sustainability as strategy, with the economics modeled honestly, avoid the greenwashing trap and build something durable.
How to Put Academic Research to Work
Reading a study is easy. Translating it is the skill. Three habits help. First, read for the mechanism, the reason an effect happens, because the mechanism travels across contexts even when the exact numbers do not. Second, treat each finding as a hypothesis for your own market and validate it with your first-party data rather than importing it wholesale. Third, respect the lag. Research is slower than the news cycle, but the frameworks it produces tend to outlive the platforms and tactics that come and go.
Put together, the studies above tell a consistent story. The most valuable marketing decisions of the next few years will sit at the meeting point of evidence and execution. That is the space where good research stops being academic and starts being an edge.
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References
Amaldoss, W. and Prusty, S. (2025). Sustainable Consumption: A Strategic Analysis. Marketing Science, 44(5), 1038–1057. https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2023.0287
Arora, N., Chakraborty, I. and Nishimura, Y. (2025). AI-Human Hybrids for Marketing Research: Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) as Collaborators. Journal of Marketing, 89(2), 43–70. https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429241276529
Huang, M.-H. and Rust, R. T. (2024). The Caring Machine: Feeling AI for Customer Care. Journal of Marketing. https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429231224748
Tully, S. M., Longoni, C. and Appel, G. (2025). Lower Artificial Intelligence Literacy Predicts Greater AI Receptivity. Journal of Marketing, 89(5), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429251314491
Uduehi, E., Saint Clair, J. K. and Crabbe, R. (2024). Intersectionality in Marketing: A Paradigm for Understanding Understudied Consumers. Journal of Marketing. https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429241258493
Zenetti, G. and Pauwels, K. (2024). Amplifying Off-Site Purchases with On-Site Retail Media Advertising. Journal of Interactive Marketing. https://doi.org/10.1177/10949968241246257
