Editorial Looking Back and Looking Forward with Interactive Marketing Edward Malthouse a, ⁎ & Charles Hofacker b a Sills Professor of Integrated Marketing Communications, Medill School at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA b Professor of Marketing, School of Business, Florida State University, 821 Academic Way, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA The editorial team of the Journal of Interactive Marketing (JIM) has now changed with the addition of Charles Hofacker. He joins Edward Malthouse, who has been with JIM since 2006, as co- editor. Such a change is a perfect occasion to thank Venkatesh Shankar who has completed his seven-year term as editor. Under Venky, the journal has grown, prospered and staked an unchallenged claim to leadership in the area of direct and interactive marketing. Here is a short list of accomplishments under his leadership: the number of submissions has grown steadily and has now more than doubled since 2003, allowing JIM to be more selective; JIM citations are now audited by Thomson Reuters and our 2009 Impact Factor is 2.600 and the 5 year Factor is 4.021; he managed the transition to our new publisher Elsevier; and there have been special issues with articles from leading marketing scholars on multichannel marketing, online pricing, data mining, online advertising, along with two anniversary issues devoted to the future of interactive marketing and another on multimedia, multichannel retailing. JIM has been fortunate to have an outstanding editorial review board, which is periodically updated. We would like to thank outgoing members Shun Yin Lam, Andrew Ainslie, Miklos Sarvary, Ziv Carmon, Imran Currim and Dan Ariely for their valuable contributions to the success of the journal. We would also like to welcome new members Scott Neslin, Steven Bellman, Adam Finn, Devon Johnson, George Milne and Ann Schlosser. The Scope of the Journal This is our first issue as co-editors and this editorial discusses our vision for JIM. Venky and our other previous editors – Russ Winer, John Deighton and Don Schultz – have established a unique position for JIM in the space of leading academic marketing journals, and we do not intend to change it. This editorial will simply clarify the scope of interactive marketing by looking back at its history and then using this perspective to project its direction into the future. The underlying story is that the scope of direct, and now interactive, marketing has been expanding to encompass many other areas of marketing. This is because marketing communication media and distribution channels are becoming more interactive, making it easier to target contacts and track outcomes. Direct marketing frameworks and approaches are well-suited for managing interactive relationships. The Journal of Direct Marketing (JDM) was founded in 1987 by the Direct Marketing Educational Foundation (DMEF) and its first editor Don Schultz. An editorial in the first issue written by the publisher, DMEF President Richard Montesi, states, “The primary purpose of this journal is to publish significant direct marketing manuscripts …” (Montesi 1987). Fig. 1 illustrates the way marketing worked at the time and the shaded parts show where JDM fit in. Most organizations set the marketing strategy, developed products and services, set the prices, and promoted and distributed them through unidirectional media and distribution channels. Some organizations used “direct marketing,” which included the offer, mailing lists, direct media such as catalogs and telemarketing, and customer databases. The Customer box, showing some key psychological customer variables, is partially shaded because JDM published articles discussing customer attitudes towards direct marketing and privacy. Finally, direct marketing has long emphasized the measurement of outcomes such as response rates and lifetime value. In 1998, the Direct Marketing Educational Foundation changed the name of the Journal of Direct Marketing to the Journal of Interactive Marketing. Then editor John Deighton stated, “The label direct marketing has become too restrictive to do justice to the ideas that it has spawned. In a very real sense, direct marketing has become too important and pervasive to be called direct marketing, since in the information age, every marketer has the potential (and perhaps the responsibility!) to be a database marketer” (Deighton and Glazer 1998, p 2). Interactive marketing expanded the scope of “direct marketing” to include “the strategic use of information and information technology as corporate assets, network-based communication, customer and managerial Journal of Interactive Marketing 24 (2010) 181 – 184 www.elsevier.com/locate/intmar ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: ecm@northwestern.edu (E. Malthouse). 1094-9968/$ - see front matter © 2010 Direct Marketing Educational Foundation, Inc. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.intmar.2010.04.005