"The paper broadens the existing notion of the customer journey, a hot topic in marketing research, to the stakeholder journey (SJ). The SJ recognizes that any stakeholder is on his/her role-related journey and that different stakeholders' journeys may intersect with one another and be interdependent," L. D. Hollebeek comments on the article's relevance.
As the idea of the SJ is new, and there were virtually no existing publications on the topic in the field of marketing, a conceptual approach was chosen to investigate the research objectives.
"We used interdependence theory to explore the interdependence of different stakeholders' journeys and their potential interactions and intersections," L. D. Hollebeek adds.
Linda D.Hollebeek also highlights that the findings of the paper are significant for the scientific community: "The main findings center on our conceptualization of the SJ, showing how stakeholders' engagement drives the SJ-based stakeholder experience, and indicating how the SJ adds value to businesses (e.g., by yielding improved stakeholder relationships)."
Co-authors of the paper are V. Kumar (St. John's University, USA), R. K. Srivastava (Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, India), and M. K. Clark (University of Reading, Henley-on-Thames, UK).
