Description
Customer engagement has been branded a marketing revolution — but, like all good revolutions, its success is still up for debate. Although it feels like a product of the digital age, the seeds of revolt were sown much earlier. By the late 20th century, marketing's trusty old playbook — the marketing mix — was already showing cracks, and customers were being reimagined: no longer passive targets, but resources, surrogate employees even active collaborators. While relationship marketing provided the blueprint, it was the technical fireworks of Web 2.0 and the rise of social media that truly lit the fuse. Suddenly, customers were not just being marketed to — they were marketing back. Engagement soared from a few dozen papers in 2010 to over a thousand a decade later, as both scholars and practitioners scrambled to keep up.Early research happily charted engagement’s positive impacts on organizations. But the plot soon thickened: engagement was not just boosting sales — it was reshaping service systems and nudging entire industries. As researchers widened the lens to include all kinds of "actors," customer engagement started to look like just one part of a much bigger (and messier) story. This lecture will dive into two big emerging challenges: how organizations can manage this swirling, multi-actor engagement world — especially when financial returns aren't guaranteed — and why we must confront engagement’s dark side, from faked to toxic online behaviors. This ‘customer revolution’ is real — but it’s more complicated (and riskier) than we first imagined.
| Period | 14 May 2025 |
|---|---|
| Held at | University of Liege, Belgium, United Kingdom |
| Degree of Recognition | International |