Understanding negative customer engagement: dimensions, determinants and the process of negative customer engagement behaviours

Generally defined as a customer's active interactions with a brand or firm that results in value co-creation, customer engagement has received significant attention from both marketing scholars and practitioners in recent years. Different from traditional marketing that focuses on customer purchase, engagement marketing encourages customers to participate in the firm's other marketing functions beyond purchase, such as product development/innovation, customer acquisition and/or marketing communication. This reflects progress in the marketing functions response to the changing role of customers, and research on customer engagement has emerged and developed since 2010. Customer engagement is typically viewed as a positive construct that contributes value to a brand/firm. However, it is argued that customer engagement can also be negative and result in adverse consequences, for example via critical/unfavourable blog posts, negative comments and reviews on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to react against a brand/firm. While value co-creation is viewed as a benefit of positive engagement, value co-destruction is a detriment of negative engagement. However, a review of literature on customer engagement indicates that there has been a lack of research on negative customer engagement, and most studies have focused on the positive domain of this construct rather than the negative domain. Therefore, this research is motivated to investigate negative customer engagement. In this research, negative customer engagement is viewed as a negative valence of customer engagement, including disengagement and negative engagement that has negative consequences for a brand/service provider, and is distinguished based on the intensity level of negative expressions. Given the inconsistency in the conceptualisation of negative customer engagement, this research aims to provide a better understanding of negative customer engagement by investigating the cognitive, affective and behavioural dimensions of this construct. In addition, while antecedents of negative customer engagement are investigated in previous studies, their findings are exploratory in nature and the underlying reasons for negative customer engagement are not known. Therefore, this research seeks to understand the determinants of negative customer engagement and further examine the process of negative customer engagement behaviours in a service consumption context in the emerging market of Vietnam in response to the call for research on customer engagement in developing countries. To achieve the research purposes, this thesis is structured in three empirical studies. A comprehensive review of literature on customer engagement and other related research areas was conducted to propose a conceptual framework illustrating the determinants of negative customer engagement, including disengaged and negatively engaged behaviours. This research advances the application of the two well-established theories: expectancy disconfirmation theory and justice theory to explain the underlying reasons for negative customer engagement. Negative service quality disconfirmation and distributive/procedural/interactional justice are suggested to be determinants of negative customer engagement through the mediating role of customer outrage. Personality traits (self-esteem, self-efficacy, risk-takers, altruism) and customer beliefs (reciprocity-vengeance) are used to further explain under what conditions customers adopt disengaged or negatively engaged behaviours. The first empirical study investigates how negative customer engagement is expressed across cognitive, affective and behavioural dimensions towards a brand/service provider in response to unfavourable service experiences. Critical incident technique method was used to examine negative critical incidents experienced by customers in a service consumption context and semi-structured interviews were used to collect data from 335 participants in shopping mall centres in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The data was analysed using a qualitative content analysis approach and the findings reveal a range of unfavourable thoughts, emotions and behaviours experienced by customers and importantly, these activities do not appear in isolation but rather interact with each other to reflect negative customer engagement as a complex and context-dependent construct. The second study empirically examines the determinants of negative customer engagement and the third study seeks to understand the process of negative customer engagement behaviours driven by negative service quality disconfirmation and distributive/procedural/interactional justice. A mixed-methods research approach including critical incident technique and survey research method was used to collect data from 404 respondents by interviews and an online self-administered survey. The findings reveal that negative service quality disconfirmation is the key driver of negative customer engagement explained through customer outrage. Non-confrontative behaviours (negative word-of-mouth and disengaged behaviour) are mostly exhibited by Vietnamese customers, revealing milder negative customer engagement in Eastern compared to Western culture countries. Self-efficacy and risk-taking traits are found to enhance negatively engaged behaviours while disengaged behaviour is not related to these traits. The results of the third study show that negative customer engagement behaviours occur in a process, starting with complaining to seek redress from the service provider. When an initial complaining is not addressed, customers tend to adopt negatively engaged complaining or become disengaged which in turn positively influences switching and negative word-of-mouth. This research significantly contributes to the literature on customer engagement by identifying sub-dimensions of cognitive, affective and behavioural dimensions of negative customer engagement in a commercial service context to provide a better understanding of the construct. In addition, this research is the first study to specify determinants of negative customer engagement by establishing conceptual linkages between negative service quality disconfirmation, perceived injustice and negative customer engagement. A conceptual framework illustrating the interactions between antecedents, a mediator and moderators provides a comprehensive understanding of the determinants of negative customer engagement. Further, this research identifies a process of negative customer engagement behaviours and provides empirical evidence to support the dynamic nature of customer engagement, which is dependent on context and develops over time. Understanding how and why negative customer engagement occurs helps service managers to develop marketing strategies to prevent or mitigate negative customer engagement, and the findings of this research are particularly useful for service providers in emerging markets with an Eastern culture such as Vietnam.