Constructing and Developing Customer Engagement Scale toward Brands

[[abstract]]This study attempts to development the customer engagement scale. Customer engagement is defined as the behavioral manifestation from a customer toward a brand going beyond the purchasing behavior. Traditionally, the firm focuses on the measurement and management of customer value which captures the customer acquisition, retention, and customer’s spending. Nowadays, the firm potentially centers on the concept of customer engagement and fosters interactions between the firm and its customers to build personal two-way relationships with customers. The concept of customer engagement becomes the important issue because it can capture the values created by customers for the firm. However, the literature documents the anecdotal evidence of customer engagement, rather than the empirical scale. Thus, this study attemts to develop and construct the customer engagement scale which further provide the strategy for the management of customer engagement. Based on Kumar et al. (2010), this study develops the relevant items for four dimensions of customer engagement (i.e., customer lifetime value, customer referral value, customer influencer value, customer knowledge value). This study follows a careful scale development process including defining the concept, developing items, focus group, professional evaluation, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. This study also examines the scale’s discriminant validity from satisfaction and attitude, and their causal relationships.This study provides further evidence of the reliability and validity of the scale, and causal relationships among customer engagement, satisfaction, and attitude. Thus, the findings indicate the 15-item scale’s convergent and discriminant validity. In addition, the differences of customer engagement between product (smart phone) and service (movie theater) are compared