Adoption and Applications of Blockchain Technology in Marketing: A Retrospective Overview and Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Blockchain technology has disrupted the traditional approaches of marketing and introduced altogether contemporary marketing frameworks using its unique capabilities of decentralization, security and transparency. In recent times, this technology has attracted both academicians and practitioners to study the underlying processes and opportunities of the application of blockchain technology in marketing. Although there is an increasing deliberation in researching the use of blockchain in marketing, there exists an intermittent gap in holistic overview of the current trends and future boundaries. This article is an attempt to present a comprehensive current state and prospects of expansion in the research of the application of blockchain technology in marketing using state of the art bibliometric review analysis. The bibliometric analysis using 161 articles from Scopus database revealed the influential aspects of research such as prolific authors, influential documents, countries, affiliations, sources and keywords. Moreover, emerging research streams about the application of blockchain is identified and enumerated using network synthesis and visualization of co-citation, and keywords co-occurrence networks. These findings pave the ways for future research expansion. The results shows that the research on applications of blockchain technology has been maturing over time. However, the research streams reveal that blockchain based marketing framework is still in its infancy stage.