Exploring customer engagement in the product vs. service context

By M. Behnam, Linda D. Hollebeek, Moira Clark, R. Farabi. 2021

114 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Though customer engagement (CE) is heralded as a strategic organizational imperative, empirically derived insight into its nomological network remains sparse. Extending existing research, we therefore test service-dominant logic-informed CE vis-a-vis its key antecedents of knowledge sharing and learning, and its consequences of customer cocreation and relationship quality. We also envisage the existence of CE-based differences across physical goods (versus service) contexts, leading us to include the nature of the offering (good vs. service) as a moderating factor in our model, making a novel contribution. To test the model, a survey was conducted in the tangible sports goods (i.e., sports retail) and -service (i.e., sports club) contexts. The findings substantiate a positive effect of customer learning and knowledge sharing on CE, thus empirically validating conceptual literature-based claims. In addition, CE was found to exert a favorable effect on customer cocreation and relationship quality. Moreover, the results confirm our hypothesized moderating effect by revealing the framework’s stronger associations for service- (vs. product-based) CE. We conclude by discussing key implications that arise from our analyses.

Subfields: Marketing, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6df3b016f4ae7c4f45467f100764b7abae82f092