Review of Customer Activism Concepts

Abstract

The concept of customer engagement (CE) refers to the customer activism in value formation which is not a new notion in the marketing and management literature. Existing theories of customer activism constitute particular anchors for systemizing the knowledge on optimal CE and offer considerable value to the developing literature on the profitable CE management. Those notions are associated with two influential metatheories, such as value co-creation and network management, and include prosumption, customer participation, service and service-dominant logic, customer resource integration, extended resource-based view, user and open innovation, and customer integration in innovation process. The main objective of this chapter is to review the above-mentioned concepts in order to recognize their managerial implications which might inform CE management efforts undertaken by managers in each stage of this process. This chapter contributes to a better understanding of the CE management challenges and provides additional insights for advancing the research in this domain.