Applications of Blockchain Technology in marketing-A systematic review of marketing technology companies

Given the emerging nature of integrating Blockchain Technology (BCT) into several business fields concerning the interaction between companies and their customers, this study aims to investigate the applications of BCT in marketing through an accurate procedure of locating, selecting and analyzing existing companies using BCT in marketing. A sample that consists of 800 companies was identified using web-scraping methods. The data set was collected from initial coin offerings (ICO) websites as well as from an existing, older landscape of applications. The data set was then intensively analyzed in order to be categorized into five fields of marketing technology. Advertising and ecommerce outgrew the other fields of social & relationship, content & experience and data in absolute numbers, revealing the focus of practitioners in the past as well as gaps for the future. The authors provided future directions for researchers on and development of tools to systematically generate knowledge and improve the application of BCT and the work of practitioners in marketing.