Special Issue of Industrial Marketing Management (IMM)
Customer Engagement Design in Industrial Innovation (Industrial CE design)
Guest Editors: Hollebeek L.D.; Keeling D.I.; de Ruyter K.
Submission Deadline (6,000-8,000w. papers):30 July 2020 30 September 2020 [updated]
Overview and purpose of the Special Issue
In recent years, the customer engagement (CE) literature has rapidly advanced with insight developing in the areas of CE conceptualization, frameworks, measurement, and particular CE applications (e.g. healthcare, online communities), to name a few (Kumar and Pansari 2016; Keeling et al. 2019). Here, CE has been viewed as a customer’s cognitive, emotional, behavioral and social investment in their brand/firm interactions (Hollebeek et al. 2019, p. 166; Kumar et al. 2019, p. 141), thereby reflecting CE’s proactive customer stance and active contributions to their own value (co)creation.
While much of the CE literature has focused on the business-to-consumer (B2C) sector, research on business-to-business (B2B) or industrial CE is rapidly developing in parallel. Research in this area has addressed industrial CE’s unique nature (Hollebeek 2017), the role of differing actors’ (e.g. customers, suppliers, firms, government, etc.) engagement in B2B settings (Lehtinen et al. 2019; Wilson 2019), and the adoption of such tools as digital content marketing, social media, or video conferencing to engage customers and channel partners (De Ruyter et al. 2019; Taiminen et al. 2019; Hardwick and Anderson 2019; Leek et al. 2017).
However, despite this emerging insight, little remains known regarding the nature and implementation of those industrial firm activities, tactics, and strategies that serve to enhance or optimize CE, thereby reflecting an important knowledge gap in the area of industrial CE design. Thus, while budding insight is acquired into experience design (Lemon and Verhoef 2016; Kuehnl et al. 2019), scholarly understanding of engagement design, which has prime relevance in industrial innovation, lags behind (Heirati and Siahtiri 2019; Hollebeek and Andreassen 2018). The following key question therefore arises, which this Special Issue seeks to address: How should managers/firms design their offerings, processes and marketing communications to better engage their industrial customers and channel partners?
By offering a human-centered, reflective, iterative approach to the creation of new or improved offerings, processes, or communications (Storey and Larbig 2018, p. 101), design offers an important tool to (better) engage customers (Yu and Sangiorgi 2018; Antioco et al. 2008). Therefore, by integrating industrial CE and design, this Special Issue addresses the application and leveraging of product/service design to enhance or optimize CE in the B2B context, which have existed as largely disparate areas to date. We invite submissions that investigate antecedents, dynamics, consequences, and challenges associated with the interface of industrial CE and design in innovation-driven contexts. We welcome conceptual, methodological and empirical contributions from researchers deploying diverse methods and grounded in various research traditions. Papers considered for the Special Issue may focus on topics including, but not limited to, the following:
– What firm activities, tools, tactics, or strategies enhance or optimize industrial CE in particular contexts?
– Which are the key CE design success factors and challenges for industrial firms?
– How should industrial customer/firm interactions be designed to generate optimal client/firm outcomes?
– What are the optimal design elements in an industrial firm’s offerings, processes, and communications and their respective ratios to foster industrial CE?
– How/when are industrial customer contributions (e.g. through co-innovation) best integrated into the design of firm offerings or activities?
– Under which conditions is customer co-design most applicable or valued?
– How do industrial customers respond to automated (e.g. machine learning-based) versus face-to-face interactions?
– What ratio of customer-to-employee (vs. customer-to-machine) interactions optimizes industrial CE for particular customer segments?
– How do firms best manage (potentially) competing agendas simultaneously to optimize customer-, firm-, and/or employee outcomes (including engagement), while minimizing any associated tension (Ritter & Greersbro 2018)?
– How can specific technologies, such as smart devices, additive manufacturing, or Internet-of-Things-based tools be integrated in the design of industrial firm offerings/processes to enhance their CE?
– How do the longitudinal and relational implications of client/channel management impact on CE-optimizing industrial design?
– How does rising industrial CE stimulated through design affect purchase, vendor loyalty or commitment, and referrals?
– What impact does rising design-led industrial CE have on firm profitability and other firm- or channel performance metrics?
– What are the key return-on-investment (ROI) determinants of specific industrial CE-stimulating design innovations?
– To what extent do industrial firms’ CE tactics and strategies require rethinking or redesign to thrive in today’s rapidly evolving markets?
Preparation and submission of paper and review process
The closing date for submissions is September 30, 2020 for expected publication in 2021. Manuscripts must be submitted through Industrial Marketing Management’s EVISE platform: . Please use the dropdown menu to select the Special Issue Industrial CE design. All manuscripts must strictly follow IMM’s Author Guidelines. Submitted manuscripts, which should be around 6,000-8,000 words in length, must not have been published, accepted for publication, or presently be under consideration for publication elsewhere. Papers that do not comply with IMM’s Guidelines may be desk-rejected. As Industrial Marketing Management is widely read by an academic and business audience, all submissions should include implications for practitioners. Suitable papers will proceed to a double-blind review process; therefore, authors must not identify themselves in the main body of their paper.
Please address any questions to the guest editors: – Linda D. Hollebeek, Associate Professor of Marketing, Montpellier Business School, Professor of Marketing, Tallinn University of Technology – Debbie I. Keeling,Professor of Marketing and Associate Dean of Engagement, University of Sussex – Ko de Ruyter, Professor of Marketing and Head of Marketing GroupKing’s College London
More info here. References Antioco, M., Moenaert, R. & Lindgreen, A. (2008), “Reducing ongoing product design decision-making bias,” Journal of Product Innovation Management, 25(6): 528-545. De Ruyter, K., Keeling, D. & Cox, D. (2019), “Customer-supplier relationships in high technology markets 3.0,” Industrial Marketing Management, 79(May): 94-101. Hardwick, J. & Anderson, A. (2019), “Supplier-customer engagement for collaborative innovation using video conferencing: A study of SMEs,” Industrial Marketing Management. Heirati, N. & Siahtiri, V. (2019), “Driving service innovativeness via collaboration with customers and suppliers: Evidence from business-to-business services,” Industrial Marketing Management, 78(April): 6-16. Hollebeek, L. (2017), “Developing business customer engagement through social media engagement-platforms: An integrative S-D logic/RBV-informed model,” Industrial Marketing Management. Hollebeek, L. & Andreassen, T. (2018), “The S-D logic-informed “hamburger” model of service innovation and its implications for engagement and value,” Journal of Services Marketing, 32(1): 1-7. Hollebeek, L., Srivastava, R. & Chen, T. (2019), “S-D logic-informed customer engagement: Integrative framework, revised fundamental propositions, and application to CRM,” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 47(1): 161-185. Keeling, D., De Ruyter, K., Mousavi, S. & Laing, A. (2019), “Technology push without a patient pull: Examining digital unengagement (DU) with online health services,” European Journal of Marketing. Kuehnl, C., Jozicm D. & Homburg, C. (2019), “Effective customer journey design: Consumers’ conception, measurement, and consequences,” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 47: 551-568. Kumar, V. & Pansari, A. (2016), “Competitive advantage through engagement,” Journal of Marketing Research, 53(Aug): 497-514. Kumar, V., Rajan, B., Gupta, S. & Dalla Pozza, I. (2019), “Customer engagement in service,” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 47(1): 138-160. Leek, S., Houghton, D. & Canning, L. (2017), “Twitter and behavioral engagement in the healthcare sector: An examination of product and service companies,” Industrial Marketing Management. Lehtinen, J., Aaltonen, K. & Rajala, R. (2019), “Stakeholder management in complex product systems: Practices and rationales for engagement and disengagement,” Industrial Marketing Management, 79(May): 58-70. Lemon, K. & Verhoef, P. (2016), “Understanding customer experience throughout the customer journey,” Journal of Marketing, 80(Nov): 69-96. Taiminen, K. & Ranaweera, C. (2019), “Fostering value-laden trusted brand relationships through digital content marketing: A service-dominant logic-based view,” European Journal of Marketing. Ritter, T. & Greersbro, J. (2018), “Multidexterity in customer relationship management: Managerial implications and a research agenda,” Industrial Marketing Management. Storey, C. & Larbig, C. (2018), “Absorbing customer knowledge: How customer involvement enables service design success,” Journal of Service Research, 21(1): 101-118. Wilson, H. (2019), “Collective engagement: Four thought shackles and how to escape them,” Industrial Marketing Management. Yu, E. & Sangiorgi, D. (2018), “Service design as an approach to implement the value cocreation perspective in new service development,” Journal of Service Research, 21(1): 40-58.
