| Summary: | Understanding the dynamics of focal customer/brand relationships has gained the interest of both scholars and marketers in the last three decades. Particularly, identifying the means of building enduring relationships with customers has been a popular research stream. In recent years, the concept of engagement has been proposed to comprehensively reflect the nature of the customer/brand relationship. Customer engagement has been viewed as a valuable factor for gauging brand performance as well as a strategic imperative for establishing competitive advantage. Since 2010, an influential exploratory research stream has emerged to address the concept of engagement. However, despite the growing scholarly interest, the lack of empirical research regarding customer engagement has resulted in a limited understanding of the concept and its measurement. Following a systematic review of customer engagement studies, one limitation was apparent: the lack of a reliable and valid customer engagement scale. As such, the current research responds to the call made in two pioneering theoretical studies to develop a construct scale. Specifically, a two-stage research design, including three phases, was adopted to develop a reliable and valid construct scale. The first phase includes item generation from the existing literature and expert item judging. Two studies with two independent samples were conducted in the second and the third phases. The current research employed a numerous Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) to purify the generated items obtained from the first phase. The analyses were performed to examine the internal consistency, and discriminant and convergent validity of the scale. The findings provided evidence for a second-order customer engagement construct comprising five first-order constructs as follows: socialising, learning, sharing, advocating and co-developing. The current research has also developed a model of customer engagement in the online brand community in order to test the nomological validity of the newly developed scale. Based on the Elaboration Likelihood Model, the proposed model includes community identification, brand identification, information quality and group norm as antecedents and brand loyalty and customer satisfaction as consequences. The current research contributes further insights into the nature of the engagement concept in four ways: first, it develops a valid and reliable scale that exhibits the multi-dimensional conceptualisation of the construct. Second, it applies the new measure to examine the relationships between customer engagement with potential antecedents and consequences. Third, managers can use the newly developed scale to measure the customer engagement level to have a better understanding of customer behaviour in the online brand community. Finally, the developed model of engagement can help managers to understand the factors that influence customer engagement in the online brand community and the important role of customer engagement in brand loyalty and customer satisfaction.
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