Abstract
Increasing attention towards customer engagement has caused its measurement to remain a highly debated issue among scholars. This study adapts and validates measurement scales for customer engagement in Online Travel Communities. It builds on previous studies on scale development for customer engagement. Data were collected from 450 members of Online Travel Communities in eight countries: Australia, Canada, Hong Kong (Chinese territory), New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. The process of adapting and validating the scale involved exploratory factor analysis, testing for differential item functioning, examination of item response theory, confirmatory factor analysis, testing for invariance and criterion validity. The results found that three dimensions (affection, absorption, and interaction) suitably and adequately measure customer engagement in Online Travel Communities.
Highlights
The literature on consumer engagement (CE) is growing
Harrigan et al (2017, p. 607) recommended that ‘future research should validate the CE scale and model using random samples in countries with varying cultures.’. By building on these two studies, the aim of this study is to contribute to this debate by adapting and validating the CE scale that suits online travel communities (OTCs) with samples drawn from eight countries: Australia, Canada, Hong Kong (Chinese territory), New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States of America (USA)
An individual was considered a member of an OTC if they had either one or multiple user accounts with an online travel website, such as TripAdvisor or LonelyPlanet, or had liked a social media page related to tourism and travel and are regularly following posts on those pages, websites or blogs
Summary
The literature on consumer engagement (CE) is growing. Since its adoption into the consumer research literature, several studies have applied it in different contexts, such as brand community (Algesheimer, Dholakia, & Herrmann, 2005), Facebook (Cheung, Lee, & Jin, 2011), automobiles (Sarkar & Sreejesh, 2014) and mobile phones (Dwivedi, 2015), among others. Other critical indicators of brand performance, such as profit, sales growth and return on investment, have been linked to CE (Harrigan, Evers, Miles, and Daly, 2017; Hollebeek, 2011) While some of these studies are contextualised offline (Moreau, 2011; Sarkar and Sreejesh, 2014), social media has been the context for the majority (Cheung et al, 2011; Dessart, Veloutsou, and Morganthomas, 2016; Hollebeek, Glynn, and Brodie, 2014). Customer engagement defined as ‘. . . the level of an individual customer’s motivational, brand-related and context-dependent state of mind characterised by specific levels of cognitive, emotional and behavioural activity in direct brand interactions’ (Hollebeek, 2011, p. 790) has continued to attract both scholarly and practitioner attention in recent times
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