Customer Engagement Marketing: One of the New Advertising Trends

Customer engagement marketing, which is different from customer engagement, is one of the new terminologies and practices of the new social media age, and stripped of all technicalities, it simply means a firm’s strategic efforts to use the customer to advance its marketing and promotional activities. Advertising education and practice have been changing ever since the earliest teaching and learning of the subject in the pioneer academic programs in American universities, and the establishment of the first full-service advertising agency in Philadelphia in 1869. Although many societies can trace their earliest practices of advertising that predate the American experience of advertising, it has become commonplace to credit the US with the earliest professional advertising practices and education. Not surprisingly, the US ad scene continues to be the focal point for examining trends in advertising practice and education. As advertising continues to evolve, it is convenient to identify six epochs or trends which are (1) Traditional, (2) IMC, (3) Disruption, (4) Artificial intelligence, (5) End of capitalism, and (6) Customer engagement marketing. These are not by any means distinct and exclusive epochs because in the nature of evolving trends, their characteristics do not necessarily begin and end on a specific historical date. Customer engagement marketing is of such important significance its impact is likely to be with us for the foreseeable future. In this chapter, we provide a quick overview of the development of advertising practice and education in the US and in Nigeria before we identify the historical phases of advertising professional development in Nigeria, starting with Lintas which was established in 1928. The heart of the chapter is the explanation of customer engagement marketing, which we identify as one of the latest trends in advertising practice. We provide three recent case studies of the uses of customer engagement marketing as the new advertising in Nigeria. Our conclusion is that the Nigerian advertising scene is as interesting as any in the developed economies and Nigerian advertisers are comfortable with some of the most recent trends in global advertising education and practice which might apply in sports.