Follow your heart or listen to your mind? Emotional marketing: a bibliometric analysis and future research agenda

Abstract

Emotional marketing has been one of the most potential marketing techniques in recent years. A lot of antecedent research has demonstrated that emotional marketing makes a considerable contribution to business effectiveness, especially in branding. This paper, thus, is carried out to analyze scientific research and explore emerging themes on emotional marketing based on collected data from Web of Science (WoS). This study approaches bibliometric methods, particularly, using the co-occurrence of keywords, cocitation, and bibliographic coupling analysis to evaluate the scientific evolution of this scholarly topic over the last thirty years founded on over 2,000 publications. Additionally, the Biblioshiny technique is employed to perform descriptive statistics and discover the evolution of research themes in different periods. The results show that customer loyalty, purchase intention, and perceived value are the motor themes emerging around emotional marketing research over the last decades. This state of the art knowledge offers later researchers to gear their research toward emerging issues such as applications in the tourism industry and utilizing digital tools