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The purpose of this study is to diagnose the trajectory of influential conceptual articles in developing a research stream. The authors uncover the knowledge diffusion through influential conceptual articles and identify characteristics that make conceptual articles influential in their field.

This study draws on scientometrics, specifically an integrated approach combining quantitative citation counts with qualitative citation practices analysis that offers a comprehensive understanding of the nature and context of citations. The authors use the case of customer engagement – a prominent contemporary marketing and service research stream – to explore the trajectory of influential articles in shaping a new research stream.

This research shows that influential articles contribute to the reciprocal knowledge diffusion within and outside their home discipline. They provide anchor points for conceptual framing, conceptual refining and conceptual reconciliation – three application patterns of citations that are pivotal to navigate theory discovery and theory justification in a research field.

The study analyzes the early impact period of two influential customer engagement articles to understand the developments leading to the establishment of a new research stream. Future research drawing on automated citation and bibliometric methods may consider extended time periods.

This study traces the trajectory of influential articles in marketing and service research. The authors identify characteristics of influential conceptual articles, and recommend practices to develop a conceptual paper with the potential for an influential trajectory. It shows that while marketing and service research has a tradition of “borrowing” theories from other fields, seminal articles “lend” theories to other fields.

Actor engagement (AE) literature shows inconsistent understandings of engagement intensity. However, a holistic picture of the nature of AE intensity is foundational to advance empirical AE models and measurement frameworks. This paper provides a nuanced understanding of what engagement intensity is and how it unfolds on different network levels.

This conceptual study draws from a literature review and offers a comprehensive classification scheme of AE intensity. The literature review extends beyond marketing and service research and draws from the etymology of AE intensity in management and social science, specifically, the fields of student, employee and civic engagement.

The classification scheme clarifies that AE intensity at the individual level refers to actors' affective and cognitive tone and varying magnitudes (i.e. efforts, duration, activeness) of resource investments. At the dyad level, AE intensity represents relational strength, and at the network level, it refers to the degree of connectedness in the network.

The research reconciles conceptual inconsistencies in the AE literature. Our classification scheme goes beyond the individual actor and actor–actor dyad and offers a holistic overview of possible ways to operationalize AE intensity in networks.

The classification scheme can be used as a strategic checklist to include AE intensities of individual actors (e.g. customers and employees), relationships between these actors and network connectedness, when further developing engagement measurement tools and benchmarks.

This is the first study providing a comprehensive understanding of AE intensity from an individual, dyadic and network perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to extend existing engagement research in two directions: first, it operationalizes the dynamic nature of the engagement process within a customer-brand dyad and, second, it tests the interrelationships with other network actors in a triadic network setting.

A 2×2 experimental design models the iterative nature of the engagement process based on repeated measures at three points in time, considering the contextual effects of connections with other customers and crowding-in effects based on monetary incentives.

This research demonstrates that in a utilitarian service setting, customer engagement does not emerge per se in the dyadic interaction between the customer and the brand. For high levels of engagement behavior to occur, incentives and ties to other network actors are essential. Further, the findings suggest a non-linear relationship between engagement behavior and its antecedents and consequences: engagement behavior must overcome a certain intensity threshold to unfold its effect.

Further research is needed to explore the dynamic nature of the engagement process in experiential and interactive service settings, and more complex network settings that may involve more actors and more complex relationships.

By facilitating connections between customers and compensating for low intrinsic interest, managers can facilitate actual engagement behavior even in utilitarian service contexts. Once engagement behavior has been triggered, an increased engagement disposition, higher satisfaction, higher involvement and higher loyalty follow.

This study empirically tests the dynamic nature of the engagement process within and beyond the dyad, and has revealed a non-linear pattern of customer engagement behavior within its nomological network.

While extant service-centric research has largely focussed on managerial advantages, few studies have addressed how brand engagement emerges in the broader context of consumer lives. The purpose of this paper is to develop a novel intersubjective hermeneutic framework that bridges the socially constructed as well as the individualised meanings of brand engagement in the context of service research.

This conceptual paper adopts a theory-building approach based on recent developments in the service-centric marketing literature.

The authors offer a novel theoretical perspective that recognises the intersubjective and phenomenological nature of individual and collective consumer brand experiences, and show how such experiences emerge from socially constructed brand engagement practices using the co-constituting lens of value-in-use.

The proposed conceptual framework invites further empirical and contextual investigations of intersubjective brand engagement in both online and offline contexts.

The contribution of this framework is twofold. First, the authors draw on the intersubjective orientation and hermeneutic framework to provide conceptual clarity in relation to the nature of brand engagement practices, brand experiences, and value-in-use, and discuss their interrelationships. Second, the authors address the nature of meaning ascribed to engagement beyond customer-firm-brand relationships, and discuss why any given consumer’s experience of brand engagement reflects a complex dialectic between socially constructed and individualised brand meanings. In doing so, the integrative framework recognises the interplay between the intersubjective and phenomenological natures of consumer brand experiences, and offers insights as to how these experiences are framed by broader socially constructed engagement practices.

Valence is one of the key dimensions underlying actor engagement, yet there is limited research to provide a comprehensive understanding of the concept. The purpose of this paper is to conceptualise engagement valence in actor networks and develop an agenda for future research.

The exploration of the psychological foundations of the concept of valence and a systematic literature review from a multiple database search contribute to four sets of propositions defining the domain of the concept of actor engagement valence.

The propositions posit that valence resides in the engaging actor’s past, current and future psychological dispositions, which can shift between positive, negative and ambivalence. Actor engagement valence is triggered by the engagement objects and value propositions of other actors in the network. The antecedents of actor engagement valence comprise individual factors such as cognitive evaluations and hedonic feelings, as well as network-related factors such as social norms and shared beliefs, and the network structure. The net balance of actor engagement valence determines the actor’s engagement behaviours, and this relationship is moderated by individual and network factors.

This is the first study to conceptualise actor engagement valence, which contributes to the refinement of the actor engagement concept. This research defines the conceptual domain, deepens the understanding and provides an agenda for future research into the valence of engagement among actors in networks. The study recognises the institutional influences on actor engagement valence, and contributes to an understanding of the nature of actors’ psychological dispositions and how their valence determines the actors’ behavioural engagement manifestations.

For service research to develop as an applied social science there is the need to refresh the process of theorizing so it focuses not only on increasing new academic knowledge but also on knowledge that is managerially relevant. This paper aims to provide guidelines to achieve this.

A theorizing process that integrates general theoretic perspectives and contextual research to develop midrange theory is developed. The process is based on the philosophical foundations of pragmatism and abductive reasoning, which has the origins in the 1950s when the management sciences were being established.

A recent research stream that develops midrange theory about customer and actor engagement is used to illustrate the theorizing process.

Practicing managers, customers and other stakeholders in a service system use theory, so there is a need to focus on how theory is used in specific service contexts and how this research leads to academic knowledge that is managerially relevant. Thus, as applied social science, service research needs to explicitly focus on bridging the theory–praxis gap with midrange theory by incorporating a general theoretic perspective and contextual research.

The contribution comes from providing a broader framework to guide the theorizing process that integrates general theoretic perspectives and applied research to develop midrange theory. While general theories operate at the most abstract level of conceptualization, midrange theories are context-specific and applied theory (theories-in-use) is embedded in empirical research.

This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/EUM0000000000565. When citing the article, please cite: R. Hedley Sanderson, Roderick J. Brodie, Arch G. Woodside, (1989), “Measuring Channel Sensitivities to New Industrial Service Designs: Managerial Implications”, European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 23 Iss: 4, pp. 50 - 59.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify how brand meaning evolves as an emergent property through the cocreation processes of stakeholders on multiple levels of a brand's service ecosystem. This provides new insight into the intersection between brands, consumers and society, and emphasizes the institutionally situated nature of brand meaning cocreation processes. It further lays a holistic foundation for a much-needed discussion on purpose-driven branding.

Combining the ecosystem perspective of branding with the concept of social emergence allows clarification of brand meaning cocreation at different levels of aggregation. Emergence means collective phenomena – like social structures, concepts, preferences, states, mechanisms, laws and brand meaning – manifest from the interactions of individuals. Drawing on Sawyer's (2005) social emergence perspective, the authors propose a processual multi-level framework to explore brand meaning emergence.

Our framework spans five levels of brand meaning emergence: individual (e.g. employees and customers); interactional (e.g. where work teams or friend groups interact); relational (e.g. where internal and external actors meet); strategic (e.g. markets and strategic alliances); and systemic (e.g. regulators, NGOs and society). It acknowledges that brand positioning is an inherently co-creative process of negotiating value propositions and aligning behaviors and beliefs among broad sets of actors, as opposed to a firm-centric task.

Service research has only recently embraced a macro–micro perspective of branding processes. This paper extends that perspective by paying attention to the nested service ecosystems in which brand meaning emerges and the degree to which this process can (and cannot) be navigated by individual actors.

The collaborative economy (CE), and within it, collaborative consumption (CC) has become a central element of the global economy and has substantially disrupted service markets (e.g. accommodation and individual transportation). The purpose of this paper is to explore the trends and develop future scenarios for market structures in the CE. This allows service providers and public policy makers to better prepare for potential future disruption.

Thought experiments – theoretically grounded in population ecology (PE) – are used to extrapolate future scenarios beyond the boundaries of existing observations.

The patterns suggested by PE forecast developmental trajectories of CE leading to one of the following three future scenarios of market structures: the centrally orchestrated CE, the social bubbles CE, and the decentralized autonomous CE.

The purpose of this research was to create CE future scenarios in 2050 to stretch one’s consideration of possible futures. What unfolds in the next decade and beyond could be similar, a variation of or entirely different than those described.

Public policy makers need to consider how regulations – often designed for a time when existing technologies were inconceivable – can remain relevant for the developing CE. This research reveals challenges including distribution of power, insularity, and social compensation mechanisms that need consideration across states and national borders.

This research tests the robustness of assumptions used today for significant, plausible market changes in the future. It provides considerable value in exploring challenges for public policy given the broad societal, economic, and political implications of the present market predictions.

The objective of the Contemporary Marketing Practices (CMP) research program is to develop an understanding of how firms relate to their markets in a manner that integrates both traditional and more modern views of marketing, and incorporates an understanding of both the antecedents and consequences of different practices. This paper aims to review its first decade.

The paper adopts a theoretical approach. It reviews the history of CMP research and its outcomes. The assessment concludes with a discussion of the program's contribution to marketing knowledge and some issues and challenges for future research.

Now a decade old, the CMP research program has undertaken research in over 15 countries. The study finds that it has made a unique contribution to marketing knowledge by bridging the gap between theory and practice.

By adopting a multi‐paradigm philosophy and a multi‐method approach, a broad perspective has been achieved that integrates the traditional managerial view of marketing with relational and process arguments.