Digital Marketing in Emerging Economies

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce a call for papers for an upcoming Special Issue titled “Digital Marketing in Emerging Economies”. This Special Issue will explore how digital marketing is transforming firms, consumers, and markets in emerging economies, highlighting innovative strategies, contextual challenges, and future opportunities for sustainable growth in digitally evolving environments. Digital marketing has fast become a major driving factor of e-ecommerce, reshaping the ways in which business organisations interact with customers, create value, and build brands for sustainable profitability. Although the prior published literature has extensively investigated digital marketing strategies and outcomes in developing countries, emerging markets remain underrepresented, despite accounting for the fastest growth in digital adoption, mobile commerce, and platform-based business models. Emerging markets are known to be characterised by different cultures, institutional constraints, and environments, regulatory volatility, and inconsistent digital literacy. Common elements such as mobile-first consumption, platform dependence, dominance of social commerce, informal digital entrepreneurship, and trust-building under institutional voids challenge the universal applicability of dominant digital marketing theories developed in mature markets. This Special Issue seeks to solve this imbalance by providing theory-driven, context-sensitive, and empirically grounded insights into digital marketing in emerging markets. Key theoretical contributions made by this Special Issue to digital marketing and e-commerce may include, but are not limited to, contextualising digital marketing theory, extending e-commerce and platform research, integrating institutional and cultural perspectives, advancing through novel phenomena, and improving managerial and policy relevance.

We particularly encourage submissions addressing, topics including, but not limited to, the following:

• Digital marketing strategies in emerging economies;
• Social media marketing and influencer marketing in emerging markets;
• Mobile marketing and mobile commerce adoption;
• Consumer behaviour in digital environments within emerging economies;
• E-commerce growth, challenges, and opportunities;
• Digital branding and customer engagement;
• Data-driven and AI-enabled marketing in developing markets;
• Technology adoption and digital transformation of firms;
• Digital inclusion, access, and the digital divide;
• SME digital marketing and entrepreneurship;
• Cross-cultural and localised digital marketing practices;
• Trust, privacy, and cybersecurity in online marketing;
• Omnichannel marketing in resource-constrained contexts;
• Sustainability and ethical issues in digital marketing.

Dr. Brighton Nyagadza
Dr. Abu Bashar
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the Special Issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.