Browsing by Author "Mollen, Anne"
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Item Open Access Addressing the ghost in the machine or “Is engagement a sustainable intermediate variable between the website drivers of consumer experience and consumers’ attitudinal and behavioural outputs?”(Cranfield University, 2007-09) Mollen, Anne; Wilson, HughBackground and Purpose: In response to the cost transparency of the internet which has facilitated consumer switching behaviour, marketing practitioners have used the umbrella term of engagement to describe the experiential response to mechanisms by which consumers can be enticed and co-opted into behaviour presumed to be conducive to purchase or future purchase. It is a concept that, until recently, has been largely circumvented by the marketing academic world. Therefore, the purpose of this systematic review is to generate a workable definition of consumer brand engagement online, predicated on a research model that builds on extant academic and practitioner evidence, which by virtue of its construction: 1. Shifts the locus of theoretical attention from a mechanistic/structuralist view of online consumer experience, increasingly recognized by the academic world as insufficient in its explanatory power, to more a more unitary approach that aligns behaviourist causality with ‘experiential intensity’ 2. Establishes a common discourse, thereby reconciling academic and practitioner perspectives 3. Provides the theoretical base for preliminary work on experiential metrics, and creates a platform for future research. Methodology: The review uses ‘realist synthesis’ to refine theory from a broad range of heterogeneous sources. The chapter on methodology provides a clear audit trail showing how decisions were made, evidence scrutinised and evaluated, and findings synthesised. Findings: The review provides support for the model and the definition of online consumer brand engagement, as well some steps towards operationalising the construct. The limitations of the methodology and learning points are discussed, as well as the contribution to future research and practice.Item Open Access Customer engagement: "only connect", a reconciliation between scholastic and practitioner perspectives.(Cranfield University, 2022-05) Mollen, Anne; Wilson, Hugh; Macdonald, Emma K.The scholastic view of customer engagement is that it is a critical metric, albeit within the academic world there is a debate as to whether this critical metric is best represented experientially or behaviourally. The practitioner world is divided: for some the construct is a “vanity metric” (Weigel, 2011); others recognise the importance of the phenomenon but discard the experiential metric in favour of behavioural proxies. This thesis aims to achieve concordance between these perspectives by challenging the assumptions of both worlds about the concept’s provenance and utility It is structured around three papers. The conceptual paper (paper 1) defines customer engagement as an experiential construct, distinguishes it from neighbouring constructs (notably telepresence and interactivity), and establishes its dimensions, laying the groundwork for scale development. This paper was published in Journal of Business Research in 2010. It has become a central part of academic discourse on engagement, having 1590 Google Scholar citations by May 2022. Paper 2 explores the scholastic-practitioner disconnect about engagement. Through two large-scale surveys of media websites (n=12,125 and 3,030), it: (1) refines paper 1’s definition of engagement to take account of conceptual work in the intervening decade; (2) develops and validates an engagement scale reflecting that revised conceptualisation; (2) compares the impact on outcomes (loyalty, satisfaction and NPS) of this experiential engagement measure (‘CE’) with a behavioural measure (‘CEB@Site’), showing that the former outperforms the latter; (3) refutes the hypothesis, reflecting practitioner heuristics, that CEB@Site is a robust proxy for CE; and (4) illustrates that CEB@Site nonetheless remains a valuable metric in its own right. Context (here, different site ‘genres’) is a moderating factor that does not, however, inhibit comparisons between sites within the same category. Paper 3 examines the effect of CE on advertising receptivity (AdRecep), another crucial outcome for practitioners. Reusing paper 2’s second survey, it finds that: (1) CE drives AdRecep; (2) CE dimensions differ in their impact on AdRecep by context; (3) contextual targeting is an effective driver of AdRecep, and (4) respondents who are ‘receptive’ to advertising are also ‘responsive’ to it and exhibit a propensity to be ‘micro-influencers’. Paper 3 thereby makes the case for CE as an advertising metric of value.Item Open Access Engagement, telepresence and interactivity in online consumer experience: reconciling scholastic and managerial perspectives(Elsevier Science B.V., Amsterdam., 2010-01-01T00:00:00Z) Mollen, Anne; Wilson, HughWe propose a conceptual framework that reconciles the practitioners’ view of engagement as central to online best practice and the scholarly view that tends to use other constructs to assess consumer experience. Building on research in e-learning as well as online marketing, we characterize the consumer experiential response to website and environmental stimuli as a dynamic, tiered perceptual spectrum which includes interactivity, telepresence and engagement. We construe engagement as a cognitive and affective commitment to an active relationship with the brand as personified by the website, and we propose dimensions of this construct. We discuss how the constructs of flow and involvement are related to but distinct from the constructs within our conceptual framework. We offer suggestions for future empirical research into developing a scale for engagement and assessing its importance and utilit