Chatbots in Marketing: A Literature Review Using Morphological and Co-Occurrence Analyses

Abstract

Chatbots have become common in marketing-related applications, providing 24/7 service, engaging customers in humanlike conversation, and reducing employee workload in handling customer calls. However, the academic literature on the use of chatbots in marketing remains sparse and scattered across disciplines. The present study combines morphological analysis and co-occurrence analysis to bring structure to this area and to identify relevant research gaps. Morphological analysis divides a problem into pertinent and clearly distinguishable components, namely dimensions (at an abstract level) and variants (at a concrete level). A Zwicky box (a cross-variant matrix of dimensions) is then constructed to identify future research opportunities. Here, the authors obtain 11 dimensions and 264 variants. To eliminate inconsistent configurations (i.e., combinations of variants across dimensions), they perform a cross-consistency assessment and identify potential research gaps. To increase objectivity in the selection of relevant gaps, the authors use VOSviewer software to conduct a co-occurrence analysis of the variants.