Customer Engagement Marketing (CEM) framework: a strategic perspective

Many leading firms consider customer engagement one of their top priorities where success is identified as encouraging customers to be the firm’s Pseudo-marketers where they contribute to the marketing functions of the organisations (Pansari and Kumar, 2018). In that sense, a novel topic has been introduced to the marketing literature namely ‘customer engagement marketing’. According to Harmeling et al. (2017, p.367), Customer Engagement Marketing (CEM) is conceptualized as a “firm’s deliberate effort to motivate, empower and measure customer contributions to marketing functions”. CEM is a strategic aspect of the engagement process focussing on the planning phase of customer engagement from a firm perspective. Consequently, CEM is a fruitful research that implies a number of academic and practical implications on the best approaches and tools used to stimulate customer engagement behaviours.