Funny or Functional: Customer Engagement in Hedonic vs. Utilitarian Services
In this article, Jenna Adriana Maeve Barrett, Elina Jaakkola, Jonas Heller, and Elizabeth Christine Brüggen reflect on the way that customers engage with certain brands and services. Their research article, “Customer Engagement in Utilitarian vs. Hedonic Service Contexts,” examines this topic and how different factors determine customer engagement. This article can be found in the Journal of Service Research.
Customers may share their love for brands online, line up for hours to experience a new ride in an amusement park, and may excitedly tell their friends about the awesome new series they binged. All these actions are forms of customer engagement – an important and well-established concept in marketing and service research, encompassing the cognitive, affective, and behavioral investments customers make in their interactions with brands or service providers.
However, there are other services relevant to society that struggle to engage their customers, for example pension services. Through our many collaborative projects with the retirement industry, we have noticed that a lack of customer engagement is a major challenge. Indeed, there is research that shows that most consumers would rather vacuum clean than plan for their retirement. This is a problem as lack of engagement with retirement planning may compromise consumers’ financial wellbeing in the future.
To solve these challenges, we turned to the customer engagement literature to find evidence-based solutions to increase customer engagement. While reviewing the literature, it became apparent that this rich and diverse literature stream did not provide direct insight into the problem we were trying to solve. Service research on customer engagement is primarily preoccupied with brands and pleasure-driven services — such as theme parks where engagement is virtually assured — offered limited guidance. This research was motivated by the realization that the assumptions held about what drives customer engagement did not seem to apply to settings such as retirement planning.
We wondered why is it that customers are so engaged with some brands and services, whereas they neglect others. Our research started by comparing retirement planning to other engagement contexts, but soon we realized that the challenge is not unique to retirement planning. Conventional understanding of customer engagement often revolves around the notion that customers engage with brands or services for enjoyment and positive emotional experiences. Yet, for practical services like utilities or financial planning, where outcomes take precedence over pleasure, this may not hold true. Customers usually choose services like car washes or dental check-ups for their practical benefits, not for pleasure or enjoyment. This research bridges the gap between assumptions about customer engagement and the distinct features of utilitarian and hedonic service contexts. By analyzing fundamental features that distinguish hedonic vs utilitarian services—such as affectivity, motivational focus, perception of necessity, role of risk, and relational focus—we develop propositions that shed light on how these features influence customer drivers, firm drivers, and outcomes of customer engagement.
We believe that the customer engagement literature can be meaningfully expanded by studying how features of the service context contribute to the drivers and outcomes of engagement, both for firms as well as for customers. Whereas the customer engagement literature is already maturing, our study shows that there is tremendous growth potential left. We hope that our article stimulates new research that disentangles how features of the service context affect customer engagement.
