How to Capture Consumer Experiences: A Context-Specific Approach To Measuring Engagement

Abstract

Although academics and practitioners have embraced customer engagement as a major objective of marketing, the conceptualization and measurement of engagement is challenging. Prior research largely has relied on conventional "one-size-fits-all" measures with a fixed set of scale items. The current, more flexible approach measures engagement based on context-specific experiences that can vary across brands and products. Three studies examining engagement when consuming (a) live jazz music, (b) newspapers, and (c) television programming provided evidence that a flexible approach to measuring engagement can help predict consumer behavior. The third of these studies also provided new evidence that engagement with television programming increases advertising effectiveness.• Most conventional measures of engagement take a "one-size-fits-all" approach by generating a fixed set of scale items.• The authors instead suggest a flexible approach for measuring engagement based on qualitatively rich, context-specific experiences that can vary across brands and products.• This flexible-measurement approach is well suited to the engagement construct and highly predictive of consumption behavior, sometimes more so than traditional fixed-scale measures such as satisfaction.• In addition to monitoring satisfaction, marketers should develop and study engagement metrics (ideally by focusing on experiences that relate to consumers' goals) to attain a multifaceted understanding of their customers. INtroDuCtIoNOver the past 15 years, the construct of engagement has gathered considerable momentum as a way of expanding marketers' insight into consumers. • Engagement is a multilevel, multidimensional construct that emerges from the thoughts and feelings about one or more rich experiences involved in reaching a personal goal.• Having different experiences makes engagement multidimensional. The aggregate of the experiences is the second-order engagement construct, making it multilevel.The current authors conducted three studies that identified five broad categories of experiences that may constitute engagement:• Interaction (to connect with others),• Transportation (to escape or become diverted),• Discovery (to gain insight, knowledge, or skills),• Identity (to affirm or express one's identity), and• Civic Orientation (to contribute to society). March 2016 JOURNAL OF ADVERTISING RESEARCH 41how to CAPturE CoNSuMEr ExPErIENCES: A CoNtExt-SPECIfIC APProACh to MEASurINg ENgAgEMENt Thearf.org It is important to note, however, that these categories did not comprise an exhaustive, fixed checklist for engagement. Consistent with the notion of "context-specific expression" (Brodie et al., 2011), the specific experiences that contribute to engagement would vary depending on the type of domain, product category, and brand under investigation.Further, because engagement is context specific, the current authors did not expect high levels of all five of the experience categories for engagement to emerge.For example, experiences that are high in "transp...

Engagement with Social Media and Social Media Advertising: The Differentiating Role of Platform Type

“…To advance our knowledge of (social media) engagement and the consequences for advertising embedded in social media platforms, we adopt the engagement experience framework. This framework suggests that digital engagement develops from digital experiences and has three distinctive characteristics (Calder, Isaac, and Malthouse 2016). First, the engagement experience framework fits the media engagement literature, explaining consumermedia interactions, and therefore enables us to advance knowledge on social media engagement.…”

“…In this study we adopt an engagement approach which fits the media engagement literature and which was demonstrated to be predictive of advertising effectiveness (Davis Mersey, Malthouse, and Calder 2010). Therefore, we conceptualize engagement, in line with Calder, Isaac, and Malthouse (2016), as "a multilevel, multidimensional construct that emerges from the thoughts and feelings about one or more rich experiences involved in reaching a personal goal" (p. 40). Central to this view is the notion that engagement is manifested in various experiences (Calder, Malthouse, and Schaedel 2009).…”

“…Although this is an emergent view in the literature, its utility was demonstrated by multiple studies demonstrating that engagement differs between brands and products. For example, it was demonstrated that engagement with a newspaper is predictive of consumption behavior (e.g., readership of a newspaper) and that engagement with TV programs is predictive of evaluations of embedded advertising (Calder, Isaac, and Malthouse 2016). This approach clearly differs from approaches that conceptualize engagement as intensity of behavior or media use (e.g., readership, likes, shares).…”

“…Applying this approach to social media, engagement with social media and with advertising on social media results from how the medium and the advertising are experienced. Following the lead of Calder, Isaac, and Malthouse (2016), we explicitly contend that engagement is context specific: It varies across contexts. In the current study, context is defined as the environment of the ad provided by the vehicle carrying it: the medium context.…”

“…We postulate that on social media the context (i.e., the platform), not the content, of advertising is a key determinant of its effectiveness. Although media context research shows that engagement with magazines, TV programs, and websites can carry over to evaluations of advertising included in the medium (Malthouse, Calder, and Tamhane 2007;Calder, Malthouse, and Schaedel 2009;Calder, Isaac, and Malthouse 2016), to the authors' knowledge, this has never been tested with social media. Moreover, we argue that it is unlikely or inappropriate to equate engagement with a medium with advertising effectiveness because it disregards engagement with the embedded advertising.…”