A Current Approach to Understand Customers: A Literature Review on Customer Engagement (Müşteriyi Anlamada Güncel Bir Yaklaşım: Müşteri İlginliği Üzerine Bir Literatür Taraması)

In today’s business world, customers do not only behave in a consequence-oriented way in their communication with the company or the brand such as purchasing. They are active participants in the “customer relationships” process. As a reflection of this, customer engagement represents the changing focus of marketing. Customer engagement, which draws attention as a timely approach both in the business world and academia, was investigated in this study through a literature review. 397 articles were classified via content analysis in terms of their approach to customer engagement, the topics they examined, their theoretical backgrounds, the antecedents and consequences they handled and explained. A bibliometric analysis was also conducted based on the publication year of the articles and the journal they were published in. Our literature review shows that the focus is on the application areas of customer engagement mostly, common topics in the studies are online brand communities and social media application areas, and the service dominant logic is often used as theoretical background. While the most common antecedents of customer engagement are experience, benefits and motives, and trust, its most common consequences are customer loyalty, social presence, and commitment. Based on the study findings, an analysis for the current situation of customer engagement for the business world and research suggestions for the academia are presented.