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Introduction
Both business to customer (B2C) and business to business (B2B) customers interact with brands and companies in myriad ways. In the B2C world, consumers and shoppers are either willingly or unwillingly exposed to advertising, which, in turn, elicits a response. Responses could also be generated from point of purchase displays, PR mentions and marketing efforts on digital media. In the B2B context, customers are more likely to interact with salespeople from companies, websites or social media accounts. Recent developments in this space of interactions are the advent and rapid penetration of apps. With all these changes, interactions between brands and customers have reached hitherto unprecedented levels. Customers are cocreating products, helping to shape brand communications and also impact brand sales through review mechanisms. Over the last few decades, a significant difference has been how customers invest their time and effort in brand interactions. These investments have been studied extensively and defined as customer engagement (CE).
More formally, Hollebeek (2011a) defined CE as “the level of a customer's cognitive, emotional and behavioral investment in specific brand interactions.” This multidimensional definition captures the various complexities of these interactions. There have been over 3,605 published studies since 2010, which pertain to CE (as found on Scopus in April 2021).
Since its inception, the domain of CE has been evolving, gaining the attention of both scholars and practitioners in the past decade. The Marketing Science Institute (MSI) has also listed CE as part of its Tier I research priorities since 2010 (Marketing Science Institute, 2010, 2018, 2020). Several different perspectives have been used to research the construct. Some researchers have developed scales to measure it (Baldus et al., 2015; Hollebeek et al., 2014; So et al., 2014). Others have tried to understand the antecedents and consequences of CE (Algharabat et al., 2020; Hollebeek and Chen, 2014; Srivastava and Sivaramakrishnan, 2021b). Some studies have been limited to domestic markets (Thakur, 2019), while others have gone beyond to study CE in the context of international markets or across cultures (Nguyen et al., 2014; Tsai and Men, 2017). There has been growing interest of CE scholars in the international marketing context (Bianchi et al., 2017; Hollebeek, 2018; Levy and Gvili, 2020).
Several recent studies have...