Customer engagement: Opportunities and challenges for organizations

Customer engagement (CE) is a key research priority of the Marketing Science Institute (MSI) due to its importance to marketers, the need for more research-based knowledge on CE, the potential for achieving critical insights, and the extent to which the study of CE can benefit from collaboration between practitioners and academics (MSI 2010). Although many organizations consider CE important, this term has different meanings for different people. Hence, Brodie et al.'s (2011) conceptualization of CE provides a welcome framework for scholarly research on CE that can contribute to business practice. This commentary amplifies on how CE research can generate managerial insights; it is based on conversations with executives in some of the top marketing organizations in the world, as well as with marketing scholars. These conversations have identified three broad research questions.