BUS631: Brand Management

Today's social and economic environment is subject to permanent and increasingly rapid change. Numerous factors - including the digital revolution of recent years, advancing globalisation, but also a con-stant change in social values - make it necessary for companies and organisations today to flexibly adapt their business processes to new framework conditions.

One of these core processes is Marketing. As the end interface between the company and its environment, it is usually the first to be affected by new developments, because they deal with customers more than other business functions. In business research, the term "Marketing" is ambiguous or not exact, which due to its historical development. It ranges from the set of terms "advertising/sales/distribution" to the "concept for market-oriented corporate management". In the context of this article, Marketing is understood as an information-processing corporate func-tion at the interface with corporate's environment, which first and foremost has the task of "... researching the - both latent and manifest - needs of potential demanders and, if necessary, influencing them in the sense of corporate goals". Marketing must ensure the provision of the information necessary for planning and systematically proceeding with supply activities, in order to plan, implement and control the use of the market policy means necessary for achieving cooperatives objectives. Put simply, the actions of Marketing are based on information (and thus data).

But what are relevant data according to Marketing? Marketers are interested in customer, financial, and operational data. These data help the business to understand what and when costumer are buying, what steps the customer take in the sales process and among others. Typically obtained from different (public and/or private) sources and stored in different locations such data helps marketers to understand their target audience by identifying ideal customers, crafting compelling con-tent and building more effective campaigns or promotions.

Under the conditions of increasing digitalization and automation using information and communication technologies (ICT) - also through the increased use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) - Marketing is becoming more and more digital: as the customers go digital, Marketing steps up and data is becoming a central asset. "Digital Marketing", also known as "Online Marketing" or "Internet Marketing" and first coined in the 1990s, re-lates to marketing of any products and services in digital form using digital devices, e.g., smartphones, tablets and others, and electronically interactive technology like mails, forums, newsgroups and others. The major advantage of Digital Marketing is that a business can sell his products and/or services 24 hours and 365 days, or in other words "around the clock". In this manner, Marketing and ICT become an important partnership in a proper combination as a socio-technical system for decades. Integrated ICT supports all Marketing operations of a company and diversifies the marketing process, showing effects such as providing opportunities for advertising anywhere and at any time and increasing the overall potential of advertising.

In this context a holistic approach to manage data as an asset becomes a topic for Marketing. Data Governance with over 15 years of attendance in research is one of such approaches that within the practitioners' community and among information systems (IS) researchers is attracting growing attention. Software vendors, consulting companies and analysts have emerged and give recommendations on how to establish Data Governance in business organizations. They have proposed frameworks for Data Governance and have analysed influencing factors as well as the current status of implementation. Designing clear cross-functional processes and Governance are one of the most important challenges for Marketing in the digital age.

Such as the "Marketing" term "Data Governance" is also ambiguous or not exact in the scientific field. At the beginning of the research, Data Governance was seen as a further development of IT-Governance, which in turn evolved from Corporate Governance. Topics, such as data quality, data management, business intelligence and analytics, big data, cloud computing, data protection, trust and security, expanded the research field of Data Governance, but also led to a lack of differentiation from other research disciplines. So, Data Governance is currently defined in a different and heterogeneous manner. The business or management-oriented research group focused on handling data assets on the base of decision rights, e.g. by Otto or Weber. The technical oriented group focuses on technical implementation using commercially available software and there are researchers that addresses both camps.

Our work follows the interpretation of both camps and adapted Data Governance as an enterprise-wide framework with the key components (in other words: layer) of strategy, processes and resources (people and machines) ensures that enterprise data, especially for Marketing, is reliable and consistent, so that it can be used with confidence for operational (Marketing) processes and (Marketing) decisions now and in the future (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Key components of Data Governance

Within the strategy layer, Data Governance providing a framework that connects people to process and technology, and create standards, processes and documentations structures for how a company will collect, use and manage their (Marketing) data. Within the process layer, Data Governance establishes, implements and evaluates policies and procedures, and monitors effort and results using KPIs and state-of-art reporting. Within the resource layer, Data Governance implement structural and process organisation (people) in cooperation with ICT-tools and infrastructure as a socio-technical system.

To be more operable Data Governance can be divided into fields of action. These fields are not conclusively defined in the literature. Examples are data quality, data scope, data protection, security and compliance, data management, data catalogue, data lineage, data stewardship, data ownership, data ethics and others.

The growing evidence of Data Governance as a research field and the lack of review papers concerning the topic are the motivation for this study. The main objective of the review is to identify, assess and summarize the existing evidence of Data Governance in context of the business function Marketing in a brief overview. In the line of these goal this research intends to address the following research questions:

- RQ1: Where does the research field of Data Governance in Marketing currently stand?

- RQ2: Which action fields of Data Governance are specifically addressed?

- RQ3: What are content and trending topics of Data Governance in Marketing and how can the field mature and progress?

The research questions are designed to ensure that the collection of data is based on content analysis.