From Customer-, to Actor-, to Stakeholder Engagement: Taking Stock, Conceptualization, and Future Directions

Abstract

Despite the significant strides made in the customer engagement literature, the need to understand any marketing actor’s engagement (vs. merely the customer’s) is increasingly recognized. Therefore, the budding actor engagement (AE) concept, which is commonly grounded in S-D logic, describes any marketing actor’s engagement, including that of customers, firms, employees, suppliers, and so on. However, while S-D logic-informed AE offers important insight into actors’ mutual value creation, it largely overlooks the sociopolitical notions that (a) actors’ potentially diverging goals may see them act against (vs. pro) focal others’ interests and (b) different actors may extract differing levels of value from interactions, as advanced in stakeholder theory. Based on these gaps, we extend existing AE research by developing integrative stakeholder theory/S-D logic-informed stakeholder engagement (SE). We deduce five core SE tenets, from which we conceptualize SE as a stakeholder’s state-based, boundedly volitional resource endowment in his/her role-related interactions, activities, and/or relationships. We conclude this article by discussing important implications that arise from our analyses and by identifying avenues for further research.