Total customer engagement: designing and aligning key strategic elements to achieve growth

Purpose – Businesses today face a number of difficult challenges that make customer engagement more important than ever. The usual way in which businesses operate makes it difficult to achieve high levels of consumer engagement. Perhaps the main problem with all the bits and pieces of ideas that would promote customer engagement – branding to consumers, internal marketing within the company, and service delivery – is how to fit all these together. The way to implement such models throughout the company is not clear and not easy to understand. Design/methodology/approach – The total engagement model puts everything together into an efficient and effective system. The key is focusing on aligning all activities of the company on a unified plan for customer engagement, including advertising, service, products and the internal culture. An important benefit of the total engagement model is the synergy through total brand strategy alignment throughout the company: the whole (through integration) is greater than the sum of the parts (of which some may already be good and some not so good but they may be fragmented). The proposed model is fairly comprehensive and thereby integrates and clearly explains, with emphasis on actionability, how to design and operationalise a growth plan driven by increasing customer engagement. Findings – The findings of two case studies are presented, which illustrate the model at work. Practical implications – The approach will be of interest to managers who seek to integrate a comprehensive, actionable brand management model throughout the company in order to maximise growth potential. Originality/value – The paper outlines an original business model, the “total engagement model,” which, when executed well, can help an organisation to achieve business growth via customer engagement.