Customer Engagement

TLDR

In today’s dynamic business environment, customer engagement is increasingly recognized for co‑creating experience and value, yet systematic scholarly inquiry into its distinctiveness remains limited. The article investigates the theoretical foundations of customer engagement by applying relationship marketing theory and service‑dominant logic. The authors analyze the term across social science, management, and marketing literature, derive five propositions, and construct a framework to differentiate customer engagement from related concepts such as participation and involvement. The study concludes that customer engagement, grounded in interactive experience and value co‑creation, is a vital concept for future marketing and service‑management research.

Abstract

In today’s highly dynamic and interactive business environment, the role of “customer engagement” (CE) in cocreating customer experience and value is receiving increasing attention from business practitioners and academics alike. Despite this interest, systematic scholarly inquiry into the concept and its conceptual distinctiveness from other, associated relational concepts has been limited to date. This article explores the theoretical foundations of CE by drawing on relationship marketing theory and the service-dominant (S-D) logic. The analysis also examines the use of the term “engagement” in the social science, management, and marketing academic literatures, as well as in specific business practice applications. Five fundamental propositions (FPs) derived from this analysis are used to develop a general definition of CE, and distinguish the concept from other relational concepts, including “participation” and “involvement.” The five propositions are used in the development of a framework for future research, the undertaking of which would facilitate the subsequent refinement of the conceptual domain of CE. Overall, CE, based on its relational foundations of interactive experience and the cocreation of value, is shown to represent an important concept for research in marketing and service management.