Global Customer Engagement Shaphali Gupta, Anita Pansari, and V. Kumar ABSTRACT Advances in technology and analytics have stimulated competition in the global marketplace and augmented interactions among customers globally. It is therefore imperative for firms to understand the behavioral activities of customers around the world to keep them engaged. To do so, the authors recommend that managers familiarize themselves with countries’ cultural and economic factors. The authors use Hofstede’s cultural dimensions and country-level economic factors to explain the national differences in customer motives while engaging with the firm. This study explains that national cultural dimensions exert an effect on the relationships in the customer engagement (CE) framework proposed by Pansari and Kumar (2017). The authors discuss and develop research propositions on the impact of the relevant cultural and economic dimensions that affect the various proposed relationships in the original CE framework. Through this modified CE framework, they introduce the concept of global customer engagement to help firms design marketing strategies aligned with a country’s culture and economy to obtain improved CE and enhanced firm performance. Keywords: global customer engagement, national culture, level of involvement, level of brand value, economic growth M ultinational corporations (MNCs) have grown in number and size over the last 50 years, from 7,000 in the 1960s to more than 80,000 in 2006 (Ghemawat and Pisani 2013). This increase indicates that managers should focus on understanding the attitudes and behaviors of customers across the globe to use the most efficient and effective strategies. Customer manage- ment strategies have evolved from analyzing transactions to relationship marketing to engagement (Pansari and Kumar 2017). This is evident from the metrics used to measure customer value in the various phases of marketing. Until the early 1990s, managers analyzed customers’ trans- actional data by using past customer value, share of wallet, recency, frequency, and monetary value of purchases. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, firms gradually shifted their focus from transaction marketing to relationship marketing, based on the commitment-trust theory (Morgan and Hunt 1994). In this era, firms focused on retaining profitable customers by applying the metric of customer lifetime value (CLV; Kumar 2008). In the last decade, owing to the advent of social media and digital technology, marketers realized that there are other ways beyond purchases through which customers can contribute to the firm, such as discussing the brand on social media or leaving feedback on the company’s website. This led to the rise of the concept of customer engagement (CE), which is defined as “the mechanics of a customer’s value addition to the firm, either through direct or/and indirect contribution” (Pansari and Kumar 2017, p. 2). The direct contribution to the firm by the customer is in the form of purchases, because these purchases directly Shaphali Gupta is Assistant Professor in Marketing, Management Devel- opment Institute, Gurgaon, India, and Research Fellow, Center for Excel- lence in Brand & Customer Management, J. Mack Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University (email: shaphali.gupta@mdi.ac.in). Anita Pansari is Assistant Professor in Marketing, Eli Broad College of Business, Michigan State University (email: pansaria@msu.edu). V. Kumar (VK) (corresponding author) is the Regents’ Professor, Richard and Susan Lenny Distinguished Chair, & Professor of Marketing, and Executive Director, Center for Excellence in Brand & Customer Management, J. Mack Rob- inson College of Business, Georgia State University (email: vk@gsu.edu). VK has also been honored as the Chang Jiang Scholar, Huazhong University of Science and Technology; Fellow, Hagler Institute for Advanced Study, Texas A&M University; and Senior Fellow, Indian School of Business. The authors thank the JIM review team for their valuable guidance in the revision process. They also thank the participants of various conferences worldwide and Gayatri Shukla for their valuable feedback on the earlier versions of the manuscript. They thank Renu for copyediting a previous version of the manuscript. Seigyoung Auh served as associate editor for this article. Journal of International Marketing ©2018, American Marketing Association Vol. 26, No. 1, 2018, pp. 4–29 DOI: 10.1509/jim.17.0091 ISSN 1069-031X (print) 1547-7215 (electronic) 4 Journal of International Marketing