Journal of Interactive Marketing

About Journal of Interactive Marketing

About the Journal of Interactive Marketing

The Journal of Interactive Marketing (JIM) is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal published by SAGE Publications Inc. in the United States, and the interactive-marketing journal of the American Marketing Association (AMA). Its editorial mission, as stated by the AMA, is to identify issues and frame ideas associated with the rapidly expanding field of interactive marketing, which includes both online and offline topics related to the analysis, targeting and service of individual customers, and to publish leading-edge, high-quality, original research presenting results, methodologies, theories, concepts, models and applications on any aspect of interactive marketing.

That mission statement repays close reading, because it defines the journal against two neighbours. Against general marketing journals, JIM is the specialist: its subject is marketing in which the customer is individually analysable, targetable and serviceable — the world of direct, digital, data-driven and now AI-mediated marketing. Against practitioner media, it is unambiguously academic: the AMA expects work that meets scholarly standards of theory, method and transparency, with managerial relevance as a requirement rather than a substitute for rigour. Its own vision statement, carried in journal listings, says it wants to be a thought leader and catalyst for shaping ideas and issues in electronic, interactive and direct marketing environments, publishing work that addresses managerially important problems and can impact managerial thinking and practice.

This profile is anchored to the journal's record on this site, to the AMA's official journal pages, to SAGE as publisher, and to SCImago and OpenAlex data. SCImago's 2025 data, reproduced in this site's record, place the journal in Q1 in both of its categories with a SCImago Journal Rank of 3.125 and an H-index of 142.

Journal of Interactive Marketing at a Glance

Two cautions belong with this table. First, older SCImago-based listings sometimes name Elsevier as the journal's publisher: that reflects the journal's earlier publishing history, before its current AMA and SAGE arrangement, and the record held on this site — SAGE Publications Inc. — matches the current publisher shown on the AMA and SAGE pages. Authors verifying the journal's identity should use the ISSNs and the AMA page, not a stale aggregator publisher field. Second, the journal's start date is reported two ways for a genuine reason: coverage under the title Journal of Interactive Marketing begins in 1997, while its lineage as the field's direct-marketing journal reaches back to 1987 under its predecessor title — journal listings that give 1987 are counting the lineage, and those that give 1997 are counting the current title.

History and Position in Marketing Scholarship

Interactive marketing as a named field grew out of direct marketing — the discipline of addressing individual customers and measuring their individual responses — and was transformed by the commercial internet, which made every customer interaction recordable, testable and automatable. The Journal of Interactive Marketing grew with that transformation. Under its current title since 1997, it chronicled and shaped the field's successive waves: database marketing and customer lifetime value, e-commerce and multichannel management, search and online advertising, social media and word of mouth, mobile marketing, big data and customer relationship management, and now artificial intelligence, retail media and platform ecosystems. A retrospective in its own pages organised the first decade of that work around marketing strategy in an internet-enabled environment, and the journal's recent special issues — on information technologies and consumers' well-being, on the unanticipated consequences of interactive marketing, on big data, technology-driven CRM and artificial intelligence, and on mobile marketing — show the agenda continuing to move.

Institutionally, JIM is one of the AMA's journal family, alongside the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing's sister titles in public policy and international marketing. That family membership matters for authors: AMA journals share editorial policies, a research-transparency framework and a readership, and a JIM placement carries the association's imprimatur into business schools worldwide, where its articles are staples of doctoral seminars and digital-marketing syllabi. The journal sustains that community with instruments such as its Best Paper Award — the 2024 award went to German Zenetti and Koen Pauwels for their article on amplifying off-site purchases with on-site retail media advertising, a topic that itself signals where the field's centre of commercial gravity now sits.

Scale, from a foreground OpenAlex check for this profile: 897 works and 116,354 citations under the journal's ISSNs, an OpenAlex H-index of 163 and a two-year mean citedness of about 3.69, with topic clusters led by digital marketing and social media, marketing and advertising strategies, and consumer behaviour and pricing. For a quarterly journal publishing a few dozen papers a year, that citation density per paper is the quantitative shadow of its seminar-room presence.

Scope: What Counts as Interactive Marketing Here

The AMA mission frames the field as the analysis, targeting and service of individual customers, across online and offline settings. Concretely, the journal's pages — and its calls and special issues — organise around the following territories, each of which an author should be able to name as their paper's home.

• Digital and social media marketing. How platforms, content, creators and communities shape consumer response; how brands should design captions, formats and engagement strategies; and how social data can and cannot be used as evidence. Recent journal content on how image captions drive engagement on social media is a representative example of a small, well-identified question answered rigorously.
• Advertising in interactive environments. Targeting, retargeting and prospecting; retail media; search advertising; personalisation and its limits. The journal's featured research includes work showing that prospecting advertisements can consistently outperform retargeting against platform-reported beliefs, and work showing that personalisation can backfire when it embarrasses consumers — findings with direct budget consequences.
• Artificial intelligence and consumers. How customers respond to AI recommendations, agents and framing — including featured studies on marketing AI as "better than humans," which can alienate some consumers, and on patients trusting AI more when the news is bad. This is currently one of the journal's most active frontiers, and its special-issue calls explicitly invite cross-disciplinary work drawing on computer science, data science, neuroscience, health and other fields outside business schools.
• Customer management and value. Customer lifetime value, retention, loyalty, customer service quality and complaint handling, including employee advocacy and service interactions on social platforms — the modern descendants of the journal's direct-marketing core.
• Consumer behaviour in interactive settings. Privacy, trust, well-being and the unanticipated consequences of interactive marketing, including its special-issue attention to information technologies and consumers' well-being — the journal's critical conscience, examining not only what interactive marketing achieves but what it costs.
• Methods for interactive data. Field experiments, clickstream and platform data, text and image analytics, and causal inference on digital traces — methodologies, in the mission's own words, are within scope when they advance what interactive marketing can know.

The boundary is equally clear. General brand, pricing or product research with no interactive, individual-level or technology-mediated dimension belongs to the general marketing journals; purely technical computer-science work with no marketing question belongs elsewhere; and practitioner how-to material without scholarly method does not meet the AMA bar. The test an author should apply is whether removing the interactive element would leave the paper's contribution intact — if it would, the paper is not a JIM paper.

Metrics and Standing

SCImago. The 2025 SCImago data held in this site's record place the Journal of Interactive Marketing in Q1 in Business and International Management and in Marketing, with a SCImago Journal Rank of 3.125, an H-index of 142, and 25 documents with 779 citations across the latest three-year window. An SJR above 3 is exceptional in marketing, a field whose citation rates run well below the natural sciences; within its categories this journal sits at or near the top of the discipline's specialist titles.

Impact factor. The AMA's journal page, as researched for this profile, reports a two-year impact factor of 6.4 and a five-year impact factor of 11.7. The gap between those two figures is itself informative: it indicates a journal whose papers keep being cited well beyond the two-year window — consistent with concept and method papers that become long-lived references. An earlier rendering of the AMA page reported 7.8, and aggregators report their own varying figures, including CiteScore values that differ between listings (12.1 and 16.9 both appear in secondary sources consulted for this profile). As with every journal in this batch, the current citable Journal Impact Factor should be taken from Journal Citation Reports; the AMA figures above are the journal owner's own reporting at research time and are the most authoritative secondary statement in hand.

Interpreting the standing. Marketing academia runs on recognised journal lists, and JIM's Q1 placement in both its SCImago categories, its AMA ownership and its citation record place it firmly in the set of journals that count for tenure and promotion in marketing departments, particularly for scholars of digital and data-driven marketing. Its quarterly volume is small, which cuts both ways: each accepted paper joins a visible, heavily read set, and each submission competes for very few slots.

Editorial Policies, Transparency and Review

AMA journals operate under shared editorial policies and a Research Transparency Policy. The AMA states that papers should include enough information — in text, web appendix or supplements — to allow a reasonably trained researcher to replicate the results, with precise descriptions of research and analysis procedures; that authors must share additional details when an editor requests them after conditional acceptance; and that data and materials required to replicate and validate results must be provided to the journal prior to publication, with proprietary restrictions declared at submission. Authors planning a JIM submission should therefore design their data and materials archiving before they submit, not after acceptance: platform data licences, privacy constraints on consumer data and proprietary firm data are all common in this field, and declaring restrictions early, as the policy requires, is far better than discovering them late.

Submissions are made through the journal's ScholarOne site, listed in the AMA's submission guidelines alongside its sister journals; submissions arriving by mail or email are not processed. Special-issue calls illustrate the review model: the journal's cross-disciplinary special issue, for example, specifies double-anonymous peer review by prominent scholars in the area, with manuscripts also potentially considered by marketing practitioners and thought leaders — a reminder that managerial relevance is assessed, not assumed. The standard SAGE journal page for the title shows a conventional subscription article flow with Online First publication ahead of issue assignment.

A DOAJ check for this profile returned no listing for the journal's ISSNs, as expected for a subscription AMA title. Open access is available through the publisher's usual optional routes; authors with funder mandates should confirm the current charge and terms on the SAGE page for the journal, since no verified APC figure was in hand for this profile and none is quoted.

Who Should Submit — and How to Frame the Paper

JIM is the right target for research in which interactivity is the phenomenon: a platform field experiment, a study of targeting or personalisation, an analysis of consumer response to AI, a model of customer value in a digital channel, or a critical study of interactive marketing's consequences for well-being or privacy. It rewards papers that are simultaneously theoretically grounded and managerially consequential — the vision statement's demand that papers address managerially important problems and have the potential to impact thinking and practice is an editorial criterion, not a slogan.

Framing advice follows. Name the interactive mechanism in the title and abstract — the data, the targeting, the interface or the algorithm that makes the marketing interactive. Establish causality as credibly as the field now expects: field experiments, quasi-experiments and transparent identification strategies carry weight that cross-sectional surveys no longer do on their own. Write the managerial implications as decisions, with effect sizes a manager can weigh, not as generic exhortations. Prepare the replication package as you go, in line with AMA transparency policy. And engage the journal's own conversation: JIM papers cite JIM papers because the field's concepts were built there, and a submission that ignores the journal's prior work on its question signals unfamiliarity with the conversation it hopes to join.

Doctoral students and early-career researchers should note the journal's accessibility features: its research-insight summaries on the AMA site translate published papers for a wider audience, its Best Paper Award publicises strong work prominently, and its special issues — several explicitly cross-disciplinary — can be more receptive entry points than the regular queue for work arriving from neighbouring fields such as information systems, communication or human–computer interaction.

Using JIM as a Reader

For practitioners and students, the AMA's journal page is the friendliest entry point: its Research Insight summaries distil recent papers — on AI framing, retargeting and health recommendations among them — into short, decision-oriented reads, with the full articles accessible to AMA members through SAGE and to institutions through library subscriptions. For researchers, the journal's archive is a compact history of how marketing became data-driven, and its methods papers remain standard references for customer lifetime value, multichannel management and online consumer behaviour.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who publishes the Journal of Interactive Marketing? SAGE Publications Inc. publishes it for the American Marketing Association (AMA), whose journal page carries its editorial mission. This site's record lists SAGE Publications Inc., United States.

What are its ISSNs? Print ISSN 1094-9968 and electronic ISSN 1520-6653.

What are its impact factors? The AMA page reports a two-year impact factor of 6.4 and a five-year impact factor of 11.7, as researched for this profile. Consult Journal Citation Reports for the current citable figures.

What are its SCImago figures? In the 2025 SCImago data held on this site: Q1 in Business and International Management and in Marketing, SJR 3.125, H-index 142.

How often is it published? Quarterly — four issues per year, per journal listings — with articles appearing online first through SAGE.

When did it start? Coverage under the current title runs from 1997 in this site's record; its lineage as the field's direct-marketing journal reaches back to 1987, which is the start year some listings give.

How do I submit? Through the journal's ScholarOne site, per the AMA's submission guidelines. Submissions by mail or email are not processed.

What does the AMA require on transparency? Enough information to permit replication, precise method descriptions, and provision of data and materials needed to replicate and validate results prior to publication, with proprietary restrictions declared at submission.

Was it always published by SAGE? No — older listings name Elsevier, reflecting its earlier publishing history. The current publisher is SAGE for the AMA; verify identity by ISSN and the AMA page.

Verdict

The Journal of Interactive Marketing is the scholarly home of marketing's individual-level, technology-mediated frontier: AMA-owned, SAGE-published, Q1 in both its categories, and cited like a much larger journal because its papers define concepts the whole field uses. For research where the interaction — the data, the targeting, the interface, the algorithm — is the story, it offers the most knowledgeable reviewers and the most relevant readers in the discipline. Arrive with a managerially important problem, a credible identification strategy and a replication package ready, and the journal's small quarterly gate is worth aiming at.

Special Issues as a Map of the Field's Frontier

An author choosing where a paper belongs can read this journal's special issues as a dated map of what its editors believe matters next. The SAGE journal page lists recent special issues on information technologies and consumers' well-being, on examining the unanticipated consequences of interactive marketing, on big data, technology-driven customer relationship management and artificial intelligence, and on mobile marketing. Taken together they describe a field rotating from capability — what interactive marketing can do — toward consequence: what it does to well-being, what it does that nobody intended, and how data-intensive and AI-driven practice should be governed. The AMA's cross-disciplinary call made the same point explicitly, inviting novel approaches grounded in disciplines outside business schools — computer science, data science, engineering, health care, neuroscience and others — and asking authors to highlight the contributing disciplines in their covering letters. A regular-issue submission that speaks to one of these frontier themes, even without answering a special-issue call, is aligned with where the editors are already looking; a submission in a theme the journal has not touched for a decade bears a heavier burden of explaining why the field should turn back to it.