Customer Engagement in Sport: An updated review and research agenda

Customer engagement (CE) is an emerging perspective that provides a holistic view of the ways in which customers’ interactive experiences with organizations create value for both the parties. Central to this, is the need to develop an understanding of why a customer would choose to invest their resources (cognitive, emotional, and behavioral) with an organization, to be able to better facilitate this engagement and properly value the outcomes from it. Sport, with its inherently strong interactions for both participants and fans, would seem an ideal setting to study CE. To date, however, the CE work in sport domains has largely followed established paths. Given CE’s potential to unify many disparate areas of sport research, this paper presents a comprehensive review of the CE work to date and highlights several ways sport can leverage and advance this work through both academic research and management practice

Keeping the faith! Drivers of participation in spiritually-based communities

Spiritually based communities (SBCs) provide a range of economic and social benefits to society. Declining memberships prompt a need for greater understanding and insight into the factors that drive participation in these communities. This study provide

Facilitating student interaction capabilities: The interplay of individual, group and course-related factors

Marketing education increasingly recognizes the active role of students in their learning experience. Students co-create learning outcomes through interacting with course resources and other students. However, there is little understanding of the factors that support the development of students’ ability to interact in this learning environment. This paper examines the influence of individual and group characteristics that exist at group formation, on the development of the group and ultimately its interaction capabilities. We identify that individual goal orientation and motivation predict shared academic goals and commitment to learning. Over a period of time, these factors promote a shared vision and recognition of peer learning opportunities provided by the course, and subsequently drive student interaction capabilities. The results imply that in order to enhance interaction among students, marketing educators should focus efforts on developing peer learning opportunities and consider individual and group goals and commitment to learning when forming student groups.This work was supported by the University of Adelaide under Faculty of Professions, Learning & Teaching Grant

Market shaping dynamics : interplay of actor engagement and institutional work

Purpose: Combining institutional work and actor engagement (AE) literature, this paper aims to elucidate how the collective action of market shaping occurs through the interplay between market shapers’ institutional work and engagement of other market actors. While markets are shaped by actors’ purposive actions and recent literature notes the need to also mobilize AE, the underlying process remains nebulous. Design/methodology/approach: This paper is conceptual but supported by an illustrative case study: the Winding Tree. This blockchain-based, decentralized travel marketplace shapes a market by decoupling existing resource linkages, creating new ones and stabilizing others through a dynamic, iterative process between the market shaper’s institutional work and others’ AE. Findings: The paper develops a dynamic, iterative framework of market shaping through increased resource density, revealing the interplay between seven types of market shapers’ institutional work distilled from the literature and changes in other market actors’ engagement dispositions, behaviors and the diffusion of AE through the market. Originality/value: This research contributes to the emergent market shaping and market innovation literature by illustrating how the engagement of market actors is a fundamental means of market shaping. Specifically, it advances understanding of how market shapers’ institutional work leads to new resource linkages and higher resource density in emergent market systems through AE. The resultant framework offers an original, critical foundation for future market shaping research

Using engagement to change entrenched practices around food waste

Gaining insights into a possible institutional change around Food Waste (FW) becomes an important issue while the simple but entrenched consumption practices underlie the FW behavior. The current research aims to approach this need by investigating the role of Actor Engagement (AE) in practice change. Using Netnography, this research aims to explore the daily institutional efforts of actors engaged with online communities built by Love Food Hate Waste (LFHW) on Facebook in two different contexts. Preliminary findings identify the strategies used by practitioners to promote FW-reducing practices and corresponding patterns of AE behaviors (AEBs) as a form of institutional work accommodating different stages of practice change. Findings highlight the possibility of ensuring purposeful AE and suggest observing and organizing AEBs to have a reflexive and adaptive approach to practice change. The research can broaden the landscape of AE research toward fostering sustainable consumption and social engagement marketing

Actor Engagement in Networks: Defining the Conceptual Domain

Considerable managerial and academic interest has made engagement a key priority in marketing and service research, spurring a rapidly increasing body of literature on this topic. Academic research initially explored customer engagement (CE) and customer engagement behavior within the firm-customer dyad. Recent developments suggest a need to broaden the conceptual domain of CE not only from the focal subject of customers/consumers to a general actor-to-actor perspective but also from the firm-customer dyad to relationships among multiple actors in service ecosystems. Hence, the purpose of this article is to bring a broadened definition to the conceptual domain of actor engagement (AE) in networks. Our theorizing process adopted a propositional conceptual approach that built on CE research and was guided by the general theoretical perspective of service-dominant logic. The critical contribution of the article lies in its systematic development of the conceptual domain of AE and the potential this development has for guiding knowledge development and cross-fertilization in various research fields, including customer, work, citizen, and business engagement. We provide a definition of AE and five fundamental propositions that embody a broader network perspective of engagement and conclude by discussing an agenda for future research that illustrates its managerial relevance

Collective engagement in organizational settings

Customer engagement has emerged as a central concept in marketing. Despite extensive scholarly investigations and managerial interest though, considerations of customer engagement and emotional connections in business marketing have been scant. Researchers tend to focus on individual-level engagement, which is conceptually inadequate to address the inherently multi-actor nature of business-to-business marketing. Therefore, this article introduces the concept of collective engagement, highlighting both its characteristics and the conditions for its emergence. The resulting theoretical framework, with ten propositions, outlines the multidimensional nature of collective engagement, including its multiplicative aggregation, multidirectional valence, phenomenological and shared properties, emotional and institutional interdependence, and emergence in dynamic and multichannel settings. Collective engagement also offers a mechanism for considering emotions in business marketing, a topic that thus far has been largely ignored by the prevalent rational choice paradigm. Thus, this article contributes a systematic, coherent conceptualization of collective engagement and advances the theoretical domains of customer and actor engagement in particular and business-to-business research in general, while also suggesting a detailed research agenda.</p

Actor engagement practices in market shaping

Purpose: Markets are shaped by the purposive actions of actors, aimed at creating new linkages, improving resource density and, hence, value creation in a market (Nenonen et al, 2018). New resource linkages imply the creation, or change of actor engagement (AE hereafter) practices. However, little is understood about how ecosystem actors create or modify these resource linkages. Drawing on actor engagement (Brodie et al., 2019) and markets-as-practices literatures (Kjellberg & Helgesson, 2007; Aroujo & Kjellberg, 2011), this conceptual paper thus develops a conceptual framework examining the role of AE practices in market shaping. Hence, it contributes to our understanding of the (re-)formation of resource linkages as AE behaviors evolve and become institutionalised. Design/methodology/approach: The conceptual development is supported by an illustrative case study of the Winding Tree (https://windingtree.com/), a decentralized travel ecosystem using blockchain technology. The Winding Tree empowers actors (e.g. airlines, partners and customers) to collaborate and innovate together based on an open decentralized infrastructure (i.e. engagement platform) without any middlemen (e.g. travel agencies) being involved, thus providing ideal conditions for demonstrating market shaping through evolving AE practices. Findings: AE is a dynamic, iterative process embodying actors’ dispositions to invest resources in their interactions with other connected actors in a service system (Brodie et al., 2019). We argue that it is through the engagement process that actors interact and create new resource linkages. Hence, market shaping necessitates the creation of, or change in, AE behaviors. However, behavioral change in an individual is insufficient, as successful market shaping will require all actors in an ecosystem (including ‘customers’, ‘partners’, ‘suppliers’ and ‘users’ of the new solution) to adopt new practices to accommodate or support new market offerings. Although the institutionalization of engagement behaviors to practices can occur organically, as individual engagement behaviors coalesce and become institutionalized over time, the case of market shaping reflects the purposive actions of a focal actor, or group of actors, to create new engagement behaviors. Originality/value: This paper demonstrates actor engagement as one key mechanism for market shaping. When established market representations are disrupted, a process of de-institutionalization of engagement behaviors takes place. Inversely, when engagement practices are established as new norms and expectations, processes of institutionalization occur. While previous literature has recognized engagement as an iterative process, this is the first paper to examine the institutionalization process of engagement behaviors leading to new resource linkages and the shaping of new markets