The Key Qualities of a Strong Customer Engagement in the Customer-Brand Relationship Context

A strong customer-brand engagement has become the basis in achieving sustained competitiveness and survival. To excel at engaging customers, marketing practitioners heightened the critical need of having a clear definition and understanding of the key qualities of a strong customer engagement. Due to a lack of empirical research, the nature of customer engagement has remained rather vague. Thus, the aim of this study is to bridge this gap by determining the qualities of engaged customers with respect to cognitive, emotional, behavioural and overall engagement. A sample of 600 mobile phone users were surveyed, but only 539 responses were usable. Data were analysed using descriptive analysis. The findings show that customer engagement towards the brand is relatively moderate. Comparing the engagement dimensions, customers are engaged most by behavioural drivers, followed by emotional and cognitive drivers. Moreover, customer behavioural and emotional engagements outperform the overall engagement. This paper is an important contribution to marketing literature, particularly on customer-brand engagement and provides useful managerial insights for marketing practitioners. However, having in mind only one brand and limited choice of the sample, there is a need for replication using other brands with a more extensive sample.