Customer engagement within low involvement product categories - discovered

Abstract: Customer engagement is a relatively new topic in research and due to its importance, it has recently received a lot of attention in both academia and practice. Although the attention, it still lacks knowledge regarding its components and driving factors. While previous research solely has included high involvement product categories, the purpose of this study was to shed light on low involvement product categories, by examining the driving factors of customer engagement within low involvement product categories. A qualitative method was chosen by implementing an inductive approach, and conducting eight in-depth unstructured interviews, with sensitizing concepts as a theoretical background. The reason for the method of choice in this thesis was based on the argument that the authors wanted to contribute new insights into the research field. The findings indicated seven prominent themes that were interpreted as driving factors of customer engagement within low involvement product categories, namely, marketing communication, brand traits, brand activations, brand ambassadors, brand values, brand-self connection, and fellowship. Since the purposive sample only focused on customers, the brand perspective was excluded.