Consumer engagement is a complex phenomenon and understanding the underlying dynamics that facilitate its development, particularly in the virtual environment, is an important contemporary research priority due to its ability to influence value creation for customers and organizations, and because it introduces ongoing and multifaceted challenges for marketers. This research empirically tests hypotheses regarding the motivational drivers of consumer engagement with 308 members of two firm‐hosted virtual communities. The results suggest that marketers need a multidimensional lens to identify, understand, and manage consumers’ distinctive cognitive and affective states within this environment. Findings support the need for these firm‐hosted virtual communities to be carefully designed to facilitate knowledge sharing, provide social support, deliver an enjoyable and useful experience, and enable consumers to cocreate value through emotional empathy. This research provides critical managerial input into how best to monitor, understand, support, and ultimately leverage firm‐hosted virtual communities aligned to the emotional valence of the consumers.
PurposeThis paper aims to provide a review of how the role of information and communications technology (ICT) within marketing practice has developed over the past decade and to develop a research agenda to meet future challenges.Design/methodology/approachThe paper adopts a theoretical approach and reviews the historical and current deployment of ICT into marketing practice. It focuses on the CMP framework of marketing practice and, within that, on the original conceptions of e‐marketing within the framework and the corresponding empirical results from various CMP research projects..FindingsThe paper concludes that, regardless of the dominant focus of marketing within an organisation, marketing practitioners increasingly have an ICT requirement within their marketing practice.Practical implicationsThe paper develops the argument for academic research to focus more on ICT practice and implementation to provide a deeper understanding of ICT deployment.Originality/valueDespite the emphasis on ICT deployment in the late 1990s marketers have struggled to embrace ICT within their organisations due in part to a lack of academic clarity and study. This paper extends the Contemporary Marketing Practice framework to examine this issue.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.