Disentangling the Link Between Service Quality and Customer Brand Engagement: The Case of Abu Khader Automotive

Introduction

Customer brand engagement behaviours are becoming increasingly important to enhance firm profitability (Ballester et al, 2023). The concept of customer brand engagement (CBE) has been accorded a significant role within the marketing literature (Hollebeek et al., 2014). CBE provides a sustainable competitive advantage (Kumar & Pansari, 2016), and plays an important role as a driver of sales performance particularly in the automobile industry (Matosas and Romero, 2021). CBE has emerged as a new metric with which to assess the management of customers (Pansari and Kumar, 2017; Van Doorn et al., 2010; Verhoef et al., 2010). It illustrates the continuous development of marketing from an exchange transaction with customers towards a focus on customer satisfaction, loyalty and relationship building.

The principal objective of engagement marketing is to encourage customers to actively participate in and contribute to the firm’s marketing functions (Chang et al, 2021). Customer brand engagement enables firms to create customer interaction and participation, thereby cultivating a deep and meaningful connection between the company and the customer (Ballester et al., 2023).

Service quality is considered to be a significant determinant of the firm-customer relationship (Roy et al., 2018). Service quality has been established as an important determinant of customer satisfaction which in turn influences customers’ loyalty (Abror et al., 2020; Kuo et al., 2011) and brand engagement (Prentice et al., 2019). As such, when a firm delivers service quality that meets or exceeds customers’ expectations, the possible result will be customer brand engagement. Schiffman et al. (2012) argue that service quality is a determinant of whether the consumer ultimately remains with the company (behavioural engagement) or defects to a competitor. Thus, a service organization’s long-term success is essentially determined by its ability to expand and maintain a large and loyal customer base through service quality that meets or exceeds customer expectations.

This paper focuses on the impact of service quality on customer brand engagement on the automotive industry. This industry stands as one of the globe's largest and most sophisticated industries. In 2022, 85.4 million motor vehicles were produced around the world, an increase of 5.7% compared to 2021 (ACEA, 2023). The increase in vehicle production in 2022 was driven by a combination of factors including the transition to green mobility. As the industry shifts towards electric vehicles, changes in production processes and infrastructure investment are gradually shaping the sector (ECB Economic Bulletin, 2022).

The effect of service quality on customer brand engagement merits further investigation. As the retailing format in the automobile industry has undergone drastic changes, examining the shoppers' engaging to the car dealership as a “multidimensional concept” and investigating how various service quality dimensions of the car dealerships render a superior shopping experience impacting customer brand engagement are highly imperative (Natarajan and Ramanan, 2023).

To fill all these gaps in the literature, the general objective of this chapter is to understand how an excellent service quality developed through marketing intelligence may increase customer brand engagement. The aim of the present study is twofold: (i) to expand the knowledge of how to improve service quality through marketing intelligence; (ii) to analyse how the perceptions that customers hold about service quality can drive customer brand engagement dimensions.