Exploring customer brand engagement: definition and themes

TLDR

Organizations increasingly seek customer participation and engagement with their brands, yet scholarly understanding of customer brand engagement remains limited. This study fills that gap by reviewing the literature and developing a conceptualization of customer brand engagement through an integrative deductive–inductive approach. The authors collected qualitative data from 14 informants via depth interviews and a focus group, framing customer brand engagement within relationship marketing, service‑dominant logic, and social exchange theory. Customer brand engagement is defined as the level of a customer's cognitive, emotional, and behavioral investment in brand interactions, and the analysis identifies three key themes—immersion, passion, and activation—while outlining research limitations and implications.

Abstract

Organizations are increasingly seeking customer participation and engagement with their brands. Despite significant practitioner interest, scholarly inquiry into the 'customer brand engagement' (CBE) concept has transpired in the literature only relatively recently, resulting in a limited understanding of the concept to-date. This paper addresses this research gap by providing a literature review in this area, and developing a CBE conceptualization based on an integrative deductive (literature-based)/inductive (data-based) approach. Data were sourced from exploratory, qualitative depth-interviews and a focus group employing a total of 14 informants. Extending previous research, CBE is viewed from relationship marketing (RM) and service-dominant (S-D) logic perspectives, whilst an integrative linkage to social exchange theory (SET) is also drawn. Based on the analysis, CBE is defined as 'the level of a customer's cognitive, emotional and behavioral investment in specific brand interactions'. Further, three key CBE themes are identified, including 'immersion', 'passion' and 'activation'. The paper concludes with an overview of key research limitations and implications.