| Whether intrinsically or extrinsically motivated, guided or unguided by the firm, customers are now active contributors to a wide variety of marketing functions (e.g., customer acquisition and retention, product innovation, marketing communication, merchandising) (Malthouse et al. 2013; Nambisan 2002). They are pseudo-marketers, often with greater influence, lower costs, and more effective reach than their firm-based counterparts (Kozinets et al. 2010). This transfer of control to the customer can be a significant threat or potential opportunity for firms. This has led to an explosion of interest in Bcustomer engagement,^ which, in the past decade, has gone from a completely unused term (0 hits prior to 2007) to a topic that raises more than 6 million Google search hits. Consequently, firms are devoting substantial resources in an effort to steer customer engagement strategically; often hiring full-time managers (e.g., Director of Customer Engagement) (Verhoef et al. 2010). For example, Anheuser-Busch is expected to spend more than $200 billion annually on engagement marketing strategies, beginning in 2017 (Barris 2015). Yet confusion about the meaning of customer engagement is nearly as ubiquitous as its use, and research on customer engagement remains scarce and fragmented. The question thus remains, BHow can firms strategically guide customer engagement in ways that benefit their performance?^ Accordingly, the goal of this article is to present an emerging theory of customer engagement marketing and provide a foundation for the use of customer engagement to achieve marketing objectives. As a first step, we explicitly delineate customer engagement, a customer outcome, as distinct from customer engagement marketing (henceforward, engagement marketing), which refers to a firm’s strategic efforts. Engagement marketing represents the firm’s deliberate effort to motivate, empower, and measure a customer’s voluntary contribution to its marketing functions, beyond a core, economic transaction (i.e., customer engagement). It actively enlists customers to serve as pseudo marketers for the firm. Effective engagement marketing can reduce acquisition costs, promote customer-centric product innovations, and enhance post-purchase service quality (Malthouse et al. 2013; Nambisan 2002). It can provide a means to monitor behaviors outside the core transaction, to capture a more holistic view of the customer and more accurate measures of customer value (Kumar 2013), as well as enhancing customer satisfaction, loyalty, and, ultimately, firm performance (Ranjan and Read 2016; Rapp et al. 2013). |
