Fifty Years of Research in Marketing Leadership: A Text Mining Review

Abstract Marketing leadership is the capability of an organization to utilize its existing resources to produce a valuable output, thereby achieving a competitive advantage. To identify the key factors driving successful marketing leadership, the authors analyzed 4,598 academic papers published in the Scopus and Web of Science databases using Structural Topic Modelling (STM) for text mining. The analysis identified 20 topics, which were clustered into five emerging themes: (1) agile leadership in supply chain and digital management; (2) competitive advantage, strategy and crisis management; (3) strategic governance, environmental performance and leadership; (4) diversity, collaboration, global management; and (5) entrepreneurial success, learning and market dynamics. These themes were mapped to the theoretical lens of the resource-based view (RBV) theory to interpret the findings. The study concludes with a discussion of emerging research questions and suggests future research avenues in the domain of marketing leadership.