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Introduction
Fast-growing companies in the global economy are successfully intertwining the customer´s engagement activity with their economically oriented marketing strategies. For Amazon, Booking.com, Airbnb and various other platform businesses, customer engagement is essential to assure trust, credibility and the relevance of their services (Parker et al., 2016). There is an agreement from both academics and practitioners as to the positive effects of customer engagement. Customer engagement can lead to enhanced corporate performance (Jaakkola and Alexander, 2014), stronger competitive positions (Kumar and Pansari, 2016) and increased potential to shape new markets (Storbacka et al., 2016). However, the dynamics of the engagement process within the dyadic relationship between a customer and a brand – and beyond this dyad – are not yet well understood, and there is inconsistency concerning the theoretical understanding of the construct (Harmeling et al., 2016). One stream of research provides a better understanding of the interactive, co-creative experiences customers engage in with brands (e.g. Brodie et al., 2011; Hollebeek et al., 2014; Dessart et al., 2015). Another research stream has developed a more precise delineation of focal engagement behaviors (e.g. van Doorn et al., 2010; Jaakkola and Alexander, 2014). More recently, consideration has been given to engagement that occurs with a broader set of actors within a network (e.g. Chandler and Lusch, 2015; Storbacka et al., 2016).
This study extends existing research in the direction of empirical validation of the iterative nature of customer engagement within a dyadic setting, and empirical testing of the interrelationships with other network actors in a triadic setting. The theoretical grounding for the research aligns with Service-dominant (S-D) logic (Vargo and Lusch, 2008, 2016). An S-D logic lens was taken when introducing the network setting of a triad (Chandler and Vargo, 2011). Triads occupy a meso-level in network analysis (Wasserman and Faust, 1994), located between the dyad and higher-order aggregations such as a system. Thus, triadic structures are necessary for an understanding of the context in which dyads interconnect to form overall network structures (Madhavan et al., 2004; Chandler and Vargo, 2011). The triad is particularly useful to investigate an integrated understanding of engagement, which reflects the interplay of customer engagement disposition, behavior, and connectedness (Chandler and Lusch, 2015;...