Engagement: bibliometric analysis

The objective of this paper was to carry out a bibliometric analysis by using the different names that engagement has had in marketing to know growth trends, current research areas and to discover potential future lines of research on this subject.Method: The Scopus database was the provider of the information, analyzing a sample of 1791 documents for the period from 1996 to March 10, 2018, the date on which the data was downloaded. Results: The results show that the development of research on the subject is growing. The country that leads in number of publications is the United States, however, the most productive institution is the University of Auckland, New Zealand; and the leading journal was Computers in Human Behavior. Similarly, the most productive authors are Hollebeek, Graffigna and Malthouse; but the author who had the greatest impact on citations per year and not per number of publications was Brodie. The main areas in which a particular interest has been given are customer / consumer engagement, social media engagement, user engagement and brand engagement. It is possible to emphasize the concentration in studies that are focused on online environments (social networks and brand communities) and recent studies related to mobile environments (apps).Discussion or Conclusion: It can be concluded that engagement is a frontier issue in the area of marketing, especially focused on online environments and recently on mobile applications. It is an area of research in which there is much to do, since brands are betting every day on using more interactive channels to keep their customers and attract new ones, by generating new communication environments, involvement and engagement between brands and customers.