From Adoption to Value: System Readiness and Marketing Automation in Legacy-Bound Nordic Manufacturers

This preprint examines why marketing automation produces uneven post-adoption value in legacy-bound, mid-sized Nordic B2B manufacturing firms. It conceptualises system readiness as an interdependent configuration of technical readiness, organisational readiness and human readiness, with environmental conditions treated as contextual boundary factors. Using an exploratory qualitative multiple-case design, the study draws on seven organisational participants across six anonymised manufacturing firms, supplemented by an external expert informant. Cross-case analysis identifies three central patterns: a front-end acquisition advantage under partial readiness; increasing fragility across retention, loyalty/expansion and reactivation; and circumstances in which limited automation represents a rational strategic choice rather than technological immaturity. The paper develops the concepts of a lifecycle friction gradient and a signal-to-action chain to explain how data validity, organisational ownership and human enactment condition marketing-automation value. This manuscript is an academically revised preprint adapted from an MSc dissertation completed at the University of Salford. The empirical dataset is unchanged, and the manuscript has not been peer reviewed.