The Dynamics of Consumer Engagement with Mobile Technologies

While important insights about the customer engagement concept have been gleaned in recent literature, little remains known regarding the nature and dynamics characterizing customers’ engagement with mobile devices, particularly from a longitudinal perspective. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to examine how customer engagement with mobile technology is related to purchase behaviors over time as a dynamic iterative process. A unique database addressing customers’ mobile engagement and purchase behaviors is used for the analysis. The results from a vector autoregressive (VAR) model suggest that customer mobile disengagement, where consumers abandon an app, has a strong negative long‐term effect on purchase behaviors. However, purchase behaviors can alleviate the level of disengagement. The study, therefore, provides novel findings pertaining to the dynamic interrelationship between customers’ engagement with new digital media and purchase behaviors, and therefore it has important scholarly and managerial implications.