Guest editorial: Favoring fieldwork makes marketing more meaningful

Abstract

Online retailing and digital marketing are steadily growing in popularity (Ares et al., 2023

Singh and Söderlund, 2020). However, most everyday consumer decisions still take place beyond the computer screen, far away from university labs or crowdsourced online platforms. Despite this reality, field studies – designed to capture actual purchase or choice behavior – are surprisingly scarce in psychology, marketing and consumer research (Li et al., 2015

Liberali et al., 2013

Robitaille et al., 2021

Wang et al., 2016). In contrast, ample academic work in these disciplines use self-reported measures as the principal outcome, mainly based on university students or paid online panel members (Baumeister et al., 2007

Doli?ski, 2018

Gneezy, 2017

Otterbring et al., 2020), with the data commonly collected through the “research by convenience” approach (Pham, 2013).