Exploring customer brand engagement: definition and themes

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.

Keywords:

• customer engagement
• brands
• in-depth interviews/focus group
• conceptualization

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Professor Rod Brodie and Professor Cristel Russell from the University of Auckland Business School for providing valuable assistance at the time of conduction of this research, which forms part of the author's PhD studies. Further, the author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for providing their constructive feedback, which has been instrumental in the development of this paper.