Economic outcomes of customer engagement:Emerging fi ndings, contemporary theoretical perspectives, and future challenges

Customers nowadays are very active on social media and social networks, in which they, for instance, discuss companies and their brands (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2010). Key facilitating factors in this area include social media (e.g. Facebook and Twitter), which have increased the connectivity of customers and fi rms (e.g. Liu-Thompkins and Rogerson, 2012). As a result, customer value becomes more important for companies. For instance, the share of customer value in enterprise valuation is rising (from less than 10 per cent in 2003 to almost 20 per cent in 2013; Binder and Hanssens, 2015), research company Forrester speaks about a new era of ‘the age of the customer’ (Band, 2012), many companies have increased investment in CRM technologies (Band, 2010), and over 80 per cent of chief marketing offi cers report to expect a rising use of online customer behaviour data within their companies (cf. www.cmosurvey.org).