Research-driven apps: The last mile of marketing scholarship

This special issue is about the last mile in marketing scholarship. The last mile is a metaphor borrowed from logistics and telecommunications, where it refers to the final segment of physical delivery that is often the costliest and the most frequent to fail. In marketing scholarship, the last mile is the final segment of intellectual delivery: the move from a published finding to a situated decision made in its light. Marketing research is strongest in the upstream work of scholarly production. The field generates insight, explanation, and generalizable knowledge through experiments, econometrics, machine learning, text analysis, multimodal analytics, and causal inference. It struggles at the last mile, where stakeholders must translate research findings into context-specific action. Between the published finding and the situated decision lies a gap of interpretation, adaptation, and execution. As authors, we frequently stop short of providing the instruments that would help readers cross it. Our three recommendations in the closing pages of a published article might be insufficient.