Marketing operations alignment: A systematic literature and citation network analysis review

Abstract

     The purpose of this paper was threefold: to analyze operations and marketing alignment issues published in Taylor & Francis, Springer, Science Direct, JSTOR, and Emerald; to identif'y clusters of articles concerning operations and marketing interface research streams in the literature; and to propose areas for future research. A systematic literature review of 62 academic articles from 29 journals and 5 publishers from 2000 to 2014 was employed. We investigated the article type, data collection method, year of publication and data analysis method, methodology, and research context. Then, we identified the struc­ tural understanding of the three research domains by following the guidelines of Main Path Analysis (MPA). A systematic literature review demonstrated a growing trend in operations and marketing alignment issues in recent years. This article presents our results in two parts. First, in the descriptive statistics part, the distribution figures show that 38 articles (76%) accounted for operations management and 12 articles (34%) were from marketing journals. Hence, one marketing and operations alignment issue is a lack in the number of research articles in marketing journals. In the second part, we found three major research domains of operations and marketing interfaces which we conducted using the Pajek software 4.01: a review of the alignment between operations and marketing; identification of variables that impact the company; and analysis of the effect of the interface. Additionally, we concluded with the future of research in operations and mar­ keting alignment for each research domain. Therefore, this paper would benefit other scholars who are interested in studying mar­ keting and operations alignment issues.