Customer engagement: "only connect", a reconciliation between scholastic and practitioner perspectives.

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.