Demystifying customer brand engagement: Exploring the loyalty nexus

Abstract With its conceptual roots in fields including psychology and organisational behaviour, the engagement concept is emerging in the marketing literature, with preliminary research indicating that engaged consumers might exhibit greater loyalty to focal brands. Despite these advancements, the engagement concept remains underexplored to date. This paper addresses this gap by reviewing literature in other disciplines and marketing, and developing a tripartite customer brand-engagement conceptualisation comprising activation, identification, and absorption dimensions. Further, a conceptual model illustrating the conceptually distinct nature of and relationships between customer brand engagement and other marketing constructs is proposed, followed by a customer engagement/loyalty-based segmentation analysis. Enhanced insights into customer engagement are expected to be valuable for marketing scholars and practitioners seeking to enhance customer relationships, retention, and loyalty. The paper thus concludes with a set of research and practitioner implications, which may be used to guide future developments in this promising area.