Consumer Engagement in Online Shopping Environments: Bridging the Gap between Marketing Driven Frameworks with underlying Cognitive Consumer Responses.

This review provides theoretical advancements within the consumer behaviour field, through the measurement of consumer engagement at a subliminal level by teasing out consumer engagement concepts in marketing with consumer engagement concepts in the newly emerging field of neuro-marketing. Approach: The review of 60 articles follows a journey by first reviewing all papers concerned with online shopping envirionments and renaming this as online interactivity. Three online enviromental factors are taken into coniseration: Virtual social presence, Virtual atmospherics and Virtual theatrics:1 This provides the basis of what is measured with consumer engagement. Next, marketing theoretical frameworks for consumer behavior are considered and a modified version of the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) is proposed:2The review then splits into relevant marketing consumer engagement theories from the years of 1988-2015 key engagement concepts are that of flow:3 and user engagement:4 EEG studies on consumer engagement are reviewed, papers subject to this branch are reviewed from the years of 1998-2015 typically focusing on task engagement and arousal.Finally, EEG methods together with this view of consumer engagment is contrasted with marketing survey methods. A final conclusion is made considering how the two disciplines harmonise together. Research Limitations/ Implications:This research employs research alternatives such as female millennial consumers with a small sample size used for the EEG part of the study which may be generalised to a limited extent.
Originality/ Value: This study attempts to validate and apply a new theoretical framework born out of marketing theory. The research aims to bring together constructs from consumer engagement with a marketing perspective compared with a neuro-marketing perspective which contributes to a new field of inquiry. Results of this study has the scope to reach into new and emerging fields of the future and can be used for developing both online, virtual reality shopping environments and BCI (brain-computer-interaction) applications.Strengths of this study lies in its high ecological validity and abilities to combine traditional and non-traditional marketing methods.