Over the last decade, customers have become more interactive and networked. This is mainly due to the rise of social media allowing customers to exchange almost anytime. In this vein, the new field of customer engagement (CE) with its underlying rationale of interactive customer-company relationships has risen. For marketing scholars and practitioners CE has evolved as a major field of interest. Albeit CE is the buzzword these days when addressing the question of how to develop customer loyalty; most organizations fail to implement the concept of CE in their relationship marketing instruments. This, in particular, accounts for industries dominated by small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), such as the focal wine industry. German wineries are often struggling with changing customer behaviors coupled with the proliferation of digitalized services. Taking this issue as a starting point for the dissertation, the first paper responds to the need of a deeper understanding of the value and the application of the concept of CE. The second paper identifies qualitatively and quantitatively potential relationship marketing tools fostering CE. The third paper focuses on the loyalty program as a specific relationship marketing tool and investigates via content analysis to what extent business-to-customer loyalty programs have accounted for CE. The fourth paper assesses empirically CE in the context of loyalty programs and examines how loyalty program mechanisms affect CE and how CE influences loyalty.
Keywords: customer engagement; relationship marketing; loyalty; reward programs; wine industry
