Understanding Customer Engagement and Loyalty: A Case of Mobile Devices for Shopping Rakhi Thakur S. P. Jain Institute of Management & Research, Inside Bhavans College Campus, Munshi Nagar, Dadabhai Road, Andheri West, Mumbai 400 058, India article info Article history: Received 16 February 2016 Received in revised form 4 June 2016 Accepted 6 June 2016 Keywords: Customer engagement Customer experiences Customer loyalty Mobile devices abstract This study aims at developing and validating a measurement model for customer engagement with specific focus on mobile devices for shopping. Further, role of customer engagement in building customer loyalty is explored. The research in this investigation used three studies for developing customer en- gagement scale and validating the proposed model. The study involved data collection from experts and users through varied methods including in-depth interviews, and surveys. Further structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data. Findings of this study include development and validation of customer engagement as second order construct arising out of six different customer experiences - so- cial-facilitation, self-connect, intrinsic enjoyment, time-filler, utilitarian and monetary evaluation experiences. Further, the study established significant role of customer engagement in predicting customer loyalty in addition to existing constructs of satisfaction and convenience. This study contributes to evolving scholarly research on customer engagement. This study further provides a framework to retailers for devising matrices to track experiences and engagement of customers on mobile devices for shopping. Further, retailers may be able to use customer engagement to differentiate themselves from competition in attracting merchants and advertisers. & 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Marketing landscapes are changing in last couple of decades whereby customers are not mere passive receivers of company messages but are actively involved in interactive relationships. Customer interactions with companies are shifting from tradi- tional one-way mass media like print, radio and television to in- teractive online, social and mobile platforms. Practicing managers are therefore increasingly looking for ways to engage customers with their products through multiple online and mobile media. The research too in this domain is now shifting from customary construct of satisfaction to more active constructs of ‘involvement’, ‘experience’ and more recently ‘engagement’ in customer choice models to predict loyalty. However, existing research on customer engagement is largely conceptual (Brodie et al., 2011; Jaakkola and Alexander, 2014; Verhoef et al., 2010) with limited literature on operationalization, measurement and empirical validation of the construct. Also, engagement through mobile device, which is the first screen for a large customer base, remains to be unexplored. The consumer ‘engagement’ concept has been conceptualized to explain consumers’ interactive relationship with media chan- nels or brands (Brodie et al., 2013; Calder, Malthouse and Schaedel, 2009; van Doorn et al., 2010; Hollebeek, Glynn and Brodie, 2014). Brodie et al. (2011) define ‘customer engagement’ as “a psycholo- gical state that occurs by virtue of interactive, co-creative custo- mer experiences with a focal agent/object (e.g. a media).” In the era where online and mobile media are gaining more and more importance in the lives of customers, it is important to understand how experiences on these media lead to high customer engage- ment and in turn better business results for companies. The cus- tomer engagement in this study is conceptualized as arising out of customer experiences (Calder et al., 2013; Malthouse and Schae- del, 2009) while browsing through the shopping applications on mobile device. With mobile devices being first and most intimate screens for customers, engagement on this media has high po- tential for retailers to get desirable business outcomes from cus- tomers in the form of purchases and advocacy. Further, they are likely to get favorable view from merchants and advertisers by virtue of better customer engagement. This study is aimed at ex- ploring the role of customer engagement in building customer loyalty. Towards this aim, this study has two objectives – a) to develop and validate a measurement model for customer en- gagement with specific focus on mobile devices for shopping, and b) to explore the role of customer engagement in building custo- mer loyalty. This paper achieves these objectives by a research program involving series of studies employing mixed method research. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jretconser Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jretconser.2016.06.004 0969-6989/& 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. E-mail address: rakhi.thakur@spjimr.org Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services 32 (2016) 151–163