Exploring Business Actor Engagement Dynamics : An Abstract

• One of the biggest challenges for businesses is how to engage and build long-lasting and deep connections with their customers and other partners (Wiersema, 2013). In recognition of this challenge, the concept of engagement has received growing attention and has gradually gained its momentum within marketing and service literature. Actors’ engagement – i.e., non-transactional actor behaviour that includes active collaboration and genuine interest in a relationship – imply that engaged actors have an active role in the integration of resources (e.g. goods, services, knowledge) and the perceived service outcomes (i.e. the perceived value) (Vargo & Lusch, 2011). The purpose of this qualitative study (including interview data from twenty customer firms and eight provider firms) is to explore the process of actor engagement in B2B relationships. This study thus explores business-to-business (B2B) collaboration in sustainability initiatives, and more specifically follows green leases as a type of a VEPs with aspirations to collaboratively reduce facilities’ impact on the environment, developed as a value proposition from the provider firms towards their B2B customers. Although there is plenty of research that focuses on actor engagement conceptualization (Alexander et al., 2018; Storbacka et al., 2016; Storbacka, 2019), as well as its antecedents and outcomes (Brodie et al., 2019; Hollebeek et al., 2018), the process of engagement has far gone largely unexplored (Ekman et a., 2021; Fehrer et al., 2018) because engagement has been viewed, although iterative, as a relatively static concept. Likewise, research on engagement in and between organizations has established the importance of engagement for successful relationships, but it has not fully explicated how engagement unfolds which thus limits potential insights both for theory and practice. Existing research has also largely assumed that engagement takes place naturally when a contract is in place connecting two or more parties. Moreover, given the complexity of engagement in contemporary knowledge intensive organizations, customers may need to interact with a single provider in long periods of time due to formal contracts, balancing different business logics, value understandings and perspectives over time, making engagement more complex than described in existing literature. Our study highlights that engagement fluctuates substantially and there are differences between surficial engagement (contractual relationship, formal interactions) and substantial engagement (active relationships). The study revealed that the process of B2B customer firms’ engagement with their provider firms could be viewed in three phases in relation to the sustainability value proposition (green lease): (i) initiation, (ii) emergence, and (iii) management offering both theoretical and managerial insights.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Ekonomi och näringsliv (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Economics and Business (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Actor engagement

B2B relationships

Engagement process

Value co-creation

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)