Customer engagement has emerged as a central concept in marketing. Despite extensive scholarly investigations and managerial interest though, considerations of customer engagement and emotional connections in business marketing have been scant. Researchers tend to focus on individual-level engagement, which is conceptually inadequate to address the inherently multi-actor nature of business-to-business marketing. Therefore, this article introduces the concept of collective engagement, highlighting both its characteristics and the conditions for its emergence. The resulting theoretical framework, with ten propositions, outlines the multidimensional nature of collective engagement, including its multiplicative aggregation, multidirectional valence, phenomenological and shared properties, emotional and institutional interdependence, and emergence in dynamic and multichannel settings. Collective engagement also offers a mechanism for considering emotions in business marketing, a topic that thus far has been largely ignored by the prevalent rational choice paradigm. Thus, this article contributes a systematic, coherent conceptualization of collective engagement and advances the theoretical domains of customer and actor engagement in particular and business-to-business research in general, while also suggesting a detailed research agenda.

Introduction

Customer engagement has emerged as a central concept in marketing, commonly viewed as a customer’s elevated cognitive, emotional and behavioral disposition toward brands or firms (e.g., Brodie, Hollebeek, Jurić, & Ilić, ۲۰۱۱). Marketing literature has thus far primarily examined customer engagement in business-to-consumer (B2C) contexts. Recent research indicates that engagement is also highly relevant in business-to-business (B2B) contexts (e.g., Kumar & Pansari, 2016; Reinartz & Berkmann, 2018; Jaakkola & Aarikka-Stenroos, this issue; Youssef, Johnston, AbdelHamid, Dakrory, & Seddick, 2018), however this research is only emerging and the existing understanding on engagement by organizational actors remains embryonic. The current, consumer-focused marketing research tends to treat engagement as an individual-level phenomenon (e.g., Brodie et al., 2011; Vivek, Dalela, & Beatty, 2016). Indeed, while researchers have acknowledged engagement even in multi-actor contexts and through multi-actor perspectives (e.g., Li, Juric, & Brodie, 2017), such research continues to define, treat and study engagement as an individual’s property. In this paper we argue that this view is insufficient for conceptualizing engagement (see also Nunan, Sibai, Schivinski, & Christodoulides, 2018), particularly in organizational contexts: recent organizational and occupational psychology research (e.g., Costa, Passos, & Bakker, 2014; García Buades, Martínez-Tur, Ortiz-Bonin, & Peiro, 2016; Schneider, Yost, Kropp, Kind, & Lam, 2017) suggests that engagement may also be a collective construct. The prevalence of the collective manifests in common organizational concepts like work teams (e.g., Barrick, Stewart, Neubert, & Mount, 1998), the buying center (e.g., Johnston & Bonoma, 1981), and the usage center (Macdonald, Kleinaltenkamp, & Wilson, 2016, Huber & Kleinaltenkamp, 2019).