CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 C USTOMER E NGAGEMENT B EHAVIOR
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CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW
In this chapter, we discuss the foundations and methodologies as the background knowledge of our research. The review of the CEB, CEB in new media, CEB co-creation through brand partnership, engagement site and search engine optimization are elaborated in order to build the fundamental as the required to sustain the research.
2.1 Customer Engagement Behavior
The definition of CEB, as described in Chapter 1, is customer engagement with specific firm or brand driven motivation that has beyond purchase of behavioral focus (van Doorn et al., 2010). CEB is extended from customer engagement which is a concept focus on the business and customer relationship in terms of the emphasis on the customer primacy experience. As Brodie et.al (2011) reviews those different dimensions of customer engagement, including emotional, cognitive, and behavioral. However, it’s easier to collect and analyze the customer engagement behavior especially from the new media because the customer behavior data can now be recorded through different new media platform according to different business practices (Forrester, 2008; Levy, 2013).
On the other hand we can not only get an understanding of customer’s cognitive and emotional level through collecting CEB but also stimulate customer’s cognitive and emotional level of engagement through stimulating the CEB (van Doorn et al., 2010).
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Figure 2.1 Dimension of CEB
CEB can be divided into five dimensions (See Figure 2.1), including valence, modality, scope, nature of impact, customer goals (van Doorn et al., 2010). With these five dimensions, the CEB could be determined into being positive to negative (i.e., valence), through different ways of engagement practices such as WOM and blogging (i.e., modality), variety of temporal or geographic scope (i.e., scope), different breadth or longevity of impacts (i.e., nature of impact), and diversity of customer’s goal (i.e., customer goals). For example, the KitKat have conducted a series of activities that ask customer feedback on their favorite favor which caused positive feedback, though Facebook and online forum to engage their opinions, focusing more on region of UK, being continued ever since 2012, and understand different user’s goal through the feedback and thus create a success in increasing 8% of teenager’s market.
As we reviewed the definition and five dimensions of CEB, we will develop a mechanism to achieve CEB for a firm or a brand using
CEB
Valence
scope
customer goals nature of
impact modality
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non-transactional customer behavior data on search engine. In addition, the mechanism will also include the development of the measurements of CEB on the five dimensions.
2.1.1 CEB in New media
The new media era has given opportunity for marketers to analyze CEB, because nowadays new media could record most of the CEB that customer conduct on the website and execute different strategies through new media. A conceptual framework of CEB in new media has been developed (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2010) to identify the relationship between customer, firm and new media. The main contribution of the study is dividing new media into 4 kinds of information
& services and 6 main technologies (e.g., search engine) to stimulate a virtual circle of realizing CEB through new media (See Figure 2.2). Our study will focus on helping the firm conduct the arrow (1) by building up the information
& services through monitoring CEB data that generated from arrow (2) & (3) .
Figure 2.2 CEB’s New Media Framework (adapted from Hennig-Thurau et al., 2010)
Company/Brand
New Media
Information & services Technologies
Customer -Brand Attitudes -New Media Attitudes
Other Consumers
-Affect and behavior (3)
(1) (2)
Marketing actions & outcomes
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In the framework, Hennig-Thurau et al. (2012) deduced two main reasons to affect CEB, including brand attitude (e.g.,satisfaction, liking) and new media attitudes (e.g., utilitarian, social-psychological). For new media attitudes, there’s little firm can do except communicate through multi-channel among new media and simplify the UI to stimulate the CEB. For brand attitudes, a firm thus intends to build positive image and satisfy its customers. According to van Doorn et.al (2010), customer’s brand attitude could also be affected by brand’s equity or reward provision, and also by establishing the processes and platforms to support specific customer actions (e.g., suggestions, ideas). For brand equity, Firm with high reputation and equity are likely to induce higher levels of positive CEB (Walsh, 2009). For providing rewards, firms give incentives to customers that have referral actions and thus increase the CEB. For developing the processes and support for specific customer actions, firms now use IT to build processes for customer to conduct C2C and also C2B conversation through platforms such as online chat forums, event pages, and engagement site which will discuss in 2.1.2 section. Through the improvement on the brand attitudes by increasing brand equity, providing reward provision, and giving platforms for customer to co-create, firm can form the positive virtual circle from the virtual to real cycle.
As we review the CEB and CEB in new media, we build fundamental background and idea of how to stimulate CEB and form the virtual to real positive cycle. However, in chapter one, we can see there is still gap for development of the positive circle. Thus, we intend to provide a practical implementation in search engine perspective to help firm to rebuild the positive cycle of CEB.
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As previous section 2.1.1 mentioned that there are several platforms to conduct the engagement of customer including the engagement site. An engagement site intends to cultivate the CEB through web page building and email module (Judd et al., 2012). It has the following characteristics. The engagement site collects support data from social media, image/creative assets, user content, etc. Based on the analysis of supporting data, marketers can build the web pages on the engagement site and email content to further engage the customers. Also, the engagement site has different domain name so that it can increase the business’
visibility of main website through increasing of PageRank and showing up twice time in the search engine. Our study will build up our engagement site which is inspired from the patent but in the enabling the positive CEB cycle’s point of view (See Figure 2.3).
Figure 2.3 Engagement Site Framework (adapted from Judd et al., 2012)
User Module Support Data Delivery
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