The extant literature on customer engagement has focussed on the positively valanced customer engagement, which benefit organisations through customers commitment, trust, equity, loyalty, and profitability. The customer engagement research has inadequately promoted negative customer engagement, despite the negative interactions from customers. The negative customer engagement study is increasingly relevant as it develops anger and adverse reviews causing detrimental impacts to the organisation. The investigation of negative customer engagement is significant as customer engagement is a reciprocal concept in the dynamic marketing environment, and customer-brand/organisation relationship is not always positive. This study aims to investigate the effects of positive customer engagement (+CE) valence in conjunction with the negative customer engagement (-CE) valence in the context of Indian small and medium enterprise (SME) brands. The dual CE valences are conceptualised through affective, cognitive, and behavioural dimensions, and in relation to the antecedents of brand value congruity, disconfirmation, involvement and the outcome variable electronic-word-of-mouth (E-WOM). The study adopted quantitative research methods for data collection from 456 samples, using Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), a crowdsourcing online platform. A total of fourteen hypotheses indicating direct and indirect relationships were formulated, and structural equation modelling (SEM) was utilised to test the proposed relationships. The findings provided substantial support for twelve of the proposed research hypotheses. The theoretical contributions conceptually and empirically influence the burgeoning literature of positive and negative customer engagement. In particular, the research contributes to the dual nature of the customer engagement literature and its influence on E-WOM. The theoretical contributions to the SME context are one of the novel contributions with dual customer engagement focus. The theoretical understanding of dual customer engagement in the online context and in the social media context of SMEs is another contribution. The study offers managerial contributions which are the practical guidelines to the SME managers in dealing with adverse/negative customer engagement behaviours. The implications suggest on attaining sustainable competitive advantage in the competitive environment.
| Date of Award | 12 Jun 2025 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Tribi Budhathoki (Main Supervisor) & Omar Khaled Abdelrahman (Co-Supervisor) |
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