Guest editorial: Favoring fieldwork makes marketing more meaningful

Online retailing and digital marketing are steadily growing in popularity (Ares et al., 2023; Singh and Söderlund, 2020). However, most everyday consumer decisions still take place beyond the computer screen, far away from university labs or crowdsourced online platforms. Despite this reality, field studies – designed to capture actual purchase or choice behavior – are surprisingly scarce in psychology, marketing and consumer research (Li et al., 2015; Liberali et al., 2013; Robitaille et al., 2021; Wang et al., 2016). In contrast, ample academic work in these disciplines use self-reported measures as the principal outcome, mainly based on university students or paid online panel members (Baumeister et al., 2007; Doliński, 2018; Gneezy, 2017; Otterbring et al., 2020), with the data commonly collected through the “research by convenience” approach (Pham, 2013).