Capturing Consumer Experiences: A Context-Specific Approach to Measuring Engagement

Abstract

Academics and practitioners alike have increasingly embraced the idea of customer engagement as a major objective of marketing. But this raises the question of how engagement should be conceptualized and measured. Existing research has approached this in a conventional way by developing “one size fits all” measures with a fixed set of scale items. In the present research, we clarify the concept of engagement and develop a new approach for measuring it – a flexible approach based on context-specific experiences that can vary across brands and products. In three studies, spanning the disparate categories of jazz music, newspapers, and television programming, we present evidence that our flexible approach to measuring engagement is predictive of consumption. In addition, our third study provides new evidence that engagement with television programming can increase advertising effectiveness.