Abstract
Amid a new marketing era featuring increasingly dynamic and interactive business environments (Hollebeek et al., 2016; Pansari & Kumar, 2016), the concept of customer engagement (CE) has sparked growing interest among scholars in mainstream marketing as well as in the hospitality and tourism domain. Recent empirical research has shown that CE enhances customers’ brand evaluations (So et al., 2016) and future purchase intentions (Hollebeek et al., 2014), and is hence described as the “expanded domain of relationship marketing” (Vivek et al., 2012, p. 129). Given such findings, service organizations—particularly those in the hospitality and tourism industry, such as hotels, airlines, and even destinations—have implemented CE strategies to connect with customers at various stages of consumption, including pre-consumption, during, and post-consumption.
In line with the concept’s theoretical significance and practical relevance, the hospitality and tourism literature has paid increasing attention to CE. Critical insights include the conceptualization and measurement of CE (So et al., 2014), its antecedents and consequences (Dijkmans et al., 2015; Ge & Gretzel, 2017; So et al., 2016), barriers to organizational adoption of CE (Chathoth et al., 2014), customers’ perceptions of and management responses to CE behaviors (Wei et al., 2013), and analysis of CE through the lens of social media affordance (Cabiddu et al., 2014).
Despite these recent advances, insight into the nature of CE and the wider nomological network within which the concept is situated remain sparse. This lacuna highlights the demand for additional research to enrich the CE literature by addressing pertinent challenges. This need motivated the present special issue on CE in hospitality and tourism services in conjunction with a track on the same theme at the 2018 Global Marketing Conference in Tokyo, Japan (July 26-29).
The Global Marketing Conference is cohosted by some of the world’s leading marketing associations: the American Marketing Association, European Marketing Academy, Australian & New Zealand Marketing Academy, Japan Society of Marketing and Distribution, International Textiles and Apparel Association, and Korean Scholars of Marketing Science. The conference has long inspired esteemed journals to publish special issues and sections and to sponsor best papers presented at the conference (e.g., Journal of Business Research, European Management Journal, Journal of Service Management, Industrial Marketing Management, Journal of Advertising, and International Marketing Review).
The “Customer Engagement in Hospitality and Tourism Services” track received 109 submissions and resulted in 10 presentation sessions in 2018, making it the largest of the 58 tracks in the conference. Authors of the presented papers included marketing and tourism and hospitality academics from around the world. Authors of the top papers presented at the conference were invited to submit their full paper to be considered for publication in this special issue. All papers were subjected to the formal double-blind review process of the Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Research (JHTR). Ultimately, 10 articles addressing some of the most pressing issues related to CE from a theoretical and practical perspective were accepted. These articles are introduced below.
Highlighting that CE has elicited significant interest from academics and practitioners over the past decade, So et al. (2020), invited by Co-Editors-in-Chief of JHTR, review and synthesize CE research published in seven leading hospitality and tourism journals between 2009 and 2019. They systematically analyze publication outlets and trajectories, study sectors, methodological approaches, analytical techniques, CE conceptualizations, classifications of its antecedents and consequences, and key mediators and moderators. They then present a model summarizing extant CE research and identify critical avenues for future scholarly inquiry into the concept. Their review provides a timely overview and reflection detailing the status of CE research and the evolution of relevant research over the past 11 years.
Given the essential role of social media in marketing, Gruss et al. (2020) investigate the impacts of certain social media post attributes on CE, taking restaurants on Facebook as an example. They introduce a novel set of text analytic features that positively influence CE and test them using big data. Their findings indicate that appeals to a sense of community belonging exert a significant positive effect on engagement. This study contributes to the body of knowledge on CE and offers concrete recommendations for how restaurants can interact with customers online.
Tourism and hospitality service providers continue to seek ways to engage customers in the value-creation process to deliver personalized experiences. Such practices have been facilitated by the rapid development of information communication technologies. Yet research on online CE has focused primarily on computer-based platform; mobile instant messaging (IM) has rarely been explored despite its promise in firm–customer interactions. Drawing from service-dominant logic and computer-mediated communication theories.
Lei et al. (2020) examine customers’ perceived co-creation experience facilitated by mobile IM. The authors empirically test the influencing factors and effects of such co-creation experiences. Their findings extend the theoretical framework of value co-creation to a context mediated by mobile IM with important managerial suggestions for hospitality and tourism organizations.
The growing popularity of digital communication technologies has transformed online engagement into a key aspect of the modern customer experience in hospitality. Flow theory is especially important for understanding CE in online environments. Kim et al. (2020) examine the antecedents of flow and investigate its influence on social media users’ positive attitudes and continuance intentions. Their results reveal that challenge, information quality, and system quality play pertinent roles in flow. Additionally, flow leads to positive user attitudes and continuance intentions, highlighting the importance of creating flow to promote CE. This study provides practical insight into gaining competitive advantages by strategically managing CE via social media marketing through flow.
With a similar focus on CE on social media, Touni et al. (2020) explore the customer–brand experience and customer involvement as drivers of CE. They also investigate brand relationship quality as a major outcome of CE, taking a hotel’s Facebook brand community as a case. They argue that hotel marketers must better understand how to engage customers with Facebook-embedded brand communities, identify the antecedents of such engagement, and recognize the outcomes brands can gain from engaged customers. The authors adopt structural equation modeling to analyze data collected from a sample of 347 Facebook users who are hotel customers. Their results confirm the significant effects of the customer–brand experience and customer involvement on CE and the role of engaging customers in building customer–brand relationships. Furthermore, CE in Facebook-embedded brand communities is found to have a mediating effect on the path from the customer–brand experience and customer involvement.
Tamajón and Pérez (2020) suggest that resource branding has become a cocreated process within virtual brand communities (VBCs), which boost users’ social connectivity and promote placemaking. The authors conduct a multidimensional and mixed-method analysis of nearly 4,000 entries across the Twitter and Facebook VBCs of two renowned European music festivals, Sónar and Primavera Sound (Barcelona), to highlight the benefits of understanding the numerous components constituting festival engagement and their interrelationships. The authors’ findings indicate the importance of considering different festival brands and their main VBCs to develop a strategy based on the structure of individual VBC users along with the most prominent dimensions of user engagement and the inherent relationships between them. In addition, consideration of “ongoing” engagement represents a potential research pathway to explore brand engagement beyond mere attendance.
As the number of hotel brands in the market continues to expand, the lodging industry is facing more intense competition than ever, and managers are realizing the importance of developing strong customer–brand relationships. The concept of brand love has thus gained attention in the hospitality literature, with academics examining various antecedents of this concept. However, the relationship between the engagement process and brand love has been largely neglected in prior studies on brand love’s antecedents. Shin and Back (2020) explore the relationship among customer–brand engagement, cognitive brand loyalty, and brand love. Their study focuses on the role of cognitive engagement in the development of brand love, as the ubiquity of online environments and social networking services has drastically altered customers’ prepurchase and postpurchase decision-making processes. Their conceptual model illustrates that cognitive engagement, operationalized as a second-order construct of attention and absorption, has a significant positive effect on brand love directly and indirectly via the mediation of cognitive brand loyalty. Their findings further indicate that how customers process brand information (cognitive engagement) is just as important as what they process (content, including the quality thereof) in fostering cognitive brand loyalty and ultimately brand love among hotel guests.
CE involves customers’ interactive experiences with a brand or service provider. Focusing on the hotel industry, Xu and Wang (2020) investigate the roles of customer interactivity, positive affect, and employee motivations in enhancing workers’ innovative behaviors under the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) framework. The authors develop and test a structural model based on data collected via a mixed-mode quantitative survey of 830 Chinese hotel employees. Their findings suggest that customer interactivity, positive affect, and motivations are influential factors in employees’ innovative behavior. Specifically, customer interactivity influences employees’ innovative behavior directly and indirectly through positive affect and intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Theoretically, this study clarifies the mechanisms underpinning customer interactivity’s effect on employees’ innovative behavior and extends the S-O-R model by applying it within the organizational behavior domain. Practically, the results highlight a need for reward systems to incorporate measures of employee performance in relation to fostering customer interactivity and engagement.
To this point, CE research has largely focused on individual behaviors; the influences of organizational attributes on CE, and the consequences of such effects, have not received similar attention. Ou et al. (2020) address this literature gap by proposing a chain relationship of service environment, CE, impulsive behavior, and customer loyalty in the casino context. To gain insight into the study variables, the service environment and brand equity are conceptualized as organizational-level constructs that exert cross-level moderating effects on this relationship chain. The authors developed two independent surveys to examine proposed cross-level relationships. Their results demonstrate that the casino service environment exerts significant direct and moderating effects on CE. Impulsive behavior can be driven by CE and prompted by the service environment. Although brand equity also exerts significant moderating effects, only certain loyalty behaviors can be enhanced by the casino brand.
Marketing research has shown that customer relationship management can reduce the consequences of service failure. But the question is for how long an instance of CE may influence a current critical incident, such as whether and how company–customer interactions during childhood may continue to influence the effects of service failure. Papen et al. (2020) posit that engagement with a company during childhood (childhood engagement) can affect subsequent perceptions of the relationship. Through an experiment with 152 participants, their study reveals that perceived controllability and childhood engagement moderate the effect of disappointment on repurchase intention. Customers with childhood engagement evaluate a service failure more favorably than customers without such experiences. Furthermore, customers are likely to react negatively if the company was deemed responsible for the failure. Accordingly, from a managerial perspective, childhood engagement and credible communication can prevent the dissolution of a customer relationship after service failure.
This special issue covers several important topics in CE in the hospitality and tourism domain. The results of these studies provide significant theoretical and practical implications for the industry. We sincerely hope readers will find this special issue informative and useful. More important, we hope that this issue offers some directions for future scholarly inquiry into CE’s nature, dynamics, and evolution.
We would like to thank the authors for contributing their fine work to this special issue. We would also like to thank a group of international experts who reviewed submissions and provided their constructive and insightful comments on early versions of the conference papers and submitted manuscripts. We thank Jenn Vallimont, Editorial Assistant of JHTR, for her assistance in managing submissions. Last, but certainly not least, we would like to thank Dr. Chris Roberts and Dr. Linda Shea, Co-Editors-in-Chief of JHTR, for their tremendous and ongoing support for this special issue from when we first proposed this idea until the issue’s compilation.
