The next section briefly reviews the main literature on the digital content
marketplace and digital content marketing. The approach taken to the structured
analysis and its themes are outlined in the following section. The body of the paper
works through a series of questions that seek to explore the nature of digital content
and the consequences that this has for its marketing. The conclusion summarises
the unique characteristics of digital content, and associated consequences for digital
content marketing. It focuses on the impact of the difficulty in developing a notion
of “value” in the context of digital content, and its consequences for value chain
structures, pricing strategies, marketing communication and branding, and licensing
and digital rights management. In addition, the customer’s experience of digital
content is influenced by all stakeholders in the value chain as well as requiring the
customer to participate in learning and co-creation of the experience. The potential
of the “value-in-use” notion of customer value as a basis for ensuring that consumers
are fully engaged as stakeholders in the content economy is discussed. On this basis
recommendations for practice and further research are developed.