More Engagement Is Not Always More Value
Marketing systems are designed to increase engagement. They seldom consider whether the customer is actually gaining value or merely becoming more difficult to lose. That is a separate issue and an important one.
There is a particular moment in a growth review that experienced marketers come to know. A metric has gone up: daily active users, session length, notification open rate, streak completion, or return visit frequency. According to any standard dashboard interpretation, this is positive news. It means greater engagement. This is the right direction.
Nevertheless, the figure doesn't have the feel of a success. The most active customers aren't the ones upgrading the product, promoting it, or tolerating minor product flaws as satisfied customers would. They are simply there, over and over again, in a manner that is hard to distinguish from compulsion.
Few dashboards include a metric that captures that distinction. Few engagement optimization systems are designed to do so. As a result, a type of business risk builds up even as engagement figures improve, only to surface later as a product or regulatory issue, a retention cliff when the friction finally becomes low enough for people to leave, or a brand association that the most active users have developed over the years through public exposure.
The relationship that appears most promising on the dashboard is often the most vulnerable in the portfolio, and to understand this, it is necessary to make a distinction that marketing has not been able to make in the past.
Research on Engagement and Passion
The Dualistic Model of Passion, developed by psychologist Robert Vallerand, has been tested in more than 900 studies and is now commonly used in consumer and brand research. It recognizes two fundamentally different kinds of passionate involvement with activities and brands.
Harmonious passion arises from autonomous internalization, as the individual freely chooses the activity, truly respects it, incorporates it into their identity without clashing with other parts of their life, and can withdraw from it when necessary without experiencing great distress. The level of involvement is flexible, and the person maintains control over it.
Obsessive passion arises from controlled internalization, as the engagement becomes a compulsion driven by internal pressure rather than true desire. It begins to take up a greater-than-normal share of one's identity. Conflict with other areas of life intensifies. The person has trouble withdrawing from it, even though the activity no longer provides the value it once did. The engagement is rigid, and the activity remains under the person's control.
The behavioral metrics are identical for both types of engagement. Both groups spend time and return. Both report a strong connection to the activity or the brand. The difference lies in the psychological structure of that connection—whether it is voluntary or forced, flexible or rigid, and whether it adds to or conflicts with the person's life.
Research into consumers' relationships with brands, using this framework, showed that harmonious passion is linked to positive outcomes such as advocacy, forgiveness of brand failures, willingness to pay premiums and true loyalty, even when comparing across product categories. On the other hand, obsessive passion, although it leads to higher scores on various measures, is connected with negative consequences, including internal conflict, lower well-being, and a relationship with the brand that is intense simply because the individual cannot easily leave it, not because they are genuinely benefited by remaining.
Harmonious and obsessive passion show the same frequency metrics. The difference lies beneath what the dashboards can measure—specifically, whether the engagement is voluntary or forced and whether the customer is gaining value or merely finding it diffifult to leave.
The Engagement Boundary
The Engagement Boundary is the point at which engagement begins to build customer captivity rather than genuine customer value. It is not fixed along a spectrum but depends on the individual customer, the product, and the organization's design decisions about how engagement is structured and rewarded.
The five stages can be identified, and organizations that design with engagement in mind are almost always aiming to guide their customers through them. The question they never ask, however, is how far.
Interest
The customer is now aware of the product and is considering it, with engagement cautious and intentional.
Engagement
Refers to the customer taking an active role, deciding to return, and deriving real value from that involvement. This is the area that engagement design focuses on optimizing.
Habit
The behavior has become automatic, reducing the cognitive effort of return. Habits are efficient and often beneficial. They are also the first stage where engagement is no longer fully conscious.
Dependence
The customer's routine has been built around the product or platform in ways that make disengagement costly or disruptive, regardless of whether the product continues to deliver value. The switching cost has become the primary retention mechanism.
Compulsion
The engagement continues even though it goes against the customer's own preferences or interests. The internal pressure to keep going has now become detached from the value the engagement provides. This is the application of Vallerand's concept of obsessive passion to a brand relationship.
The way that loyalty programs, app features, notification systems, and personalization are designed to move users from a state of Interest through Engagement and into Habit is reasonable and, in many cases, genuinely beneficial. The issue is that the same design approach is used without a mechanism to detect when Habit has become Dependence, so the optimization continues in the same direction beyond the point at which further engagement begins to create liability rather than value.
A Strategic Problem, Not Just an Ethical One
While the ethical reason for understanding the Engagement Boundary is valid, it is not the most convincing to the organizations that most need to receive it; the strategic argument is more straightforward.
Customers in relationships based on harmonious passion promote the brand, show forgiveness, and voluntarily upgrade. They are truly loyal from a commercial point of view, since they remain even when other options are available, and switching costs are low; their decision to stay is based not on obstacles but on the value the brand provides.
Customers in obsessive passion relationships, or those in the Dependence and Compulsion stages, are not loyal in that way; instead, they are trapped. Trapped customers act differently because they do not promote the brand. Research on brand addiction consistently shows that customers with obsessive relationships with a brand report lower well-being, experience greater conflict, and show more ambivalence toward the brand than those with harmonious relationships, even though their engagement levels are higher. They remain not because the brand is providing them with something, but because leaving has become difficult. If the difficulty of leaving decreases even slightly, departure can be sudden and permanent.
The retention cliff that many subscription and platform businesses encounter when a competitor lowers the cost of switching or when regulatory pressure prompts changes to dark patterns is not actually caused by competitors or regulation. It is simply the natural result of basing retention on captivity rather than on value. Although the engagement figures suggested strength, the fundamental structure was weak.
In harmonious engagement relationships, customers remain even when other options are available, and switching costs are low; those in compelled relationships, on the other hand, stay until the level of friction falls. The two relationship types appear identical in the retention dashboard but are completely different in a competitive context.
What the Diagnostic Looks Like
The engagement diagnostic, which centers on the Engagement Boundary, poses different questions from a conventional engagement audit; it does not aim to assess the level of engagement; instead, it examines the structural quality of that engagement.
What difference would it make if we made disengagement frictionless?
The response shows the extent to which current retention reflects genuine preference rather than the cost of switching. Organizations that have never made it easy to disengage are typically surprised by the response.
Are those who interact most with a product the most valuable from a commercial standpoint?
If the customers who use the service most are not also the ones with the highest customer lifetime value, the most advocacy, or the highest margins, then the engagement metric must be measuring something other than value creation. It is worth considering that frequent engagement doesn't translate into commercial value.
What do customers say when they disengage from the service?
Exit interviews and churn studies that identify relief, guilt, or ambivalence rather than regret indicate that customers are engaging in an obsessive pattern of behavior. Customers who leave after a harmonious relationship usually speak of it with regret, while those who leave because of a compelled relationship tend to express relief.
Are the mechanics we have in place rewarding for returning, or do they penalize absence?
The way streaks are structured, the way points expire, and the penalties for missing a day are all measures that aim to discourage people from leaving rather than enhance value. This difference is important because one approach leads to genuine motivation while the other leads to anxiety. Although both approaches result in short-term retention, they lead to different long-term relationships with the brand.
The Design Question That Follows
This is not an objection to engagement design; habits that provide real value, loyalty incentives that reward true loyalty, and personalization that makes a product more useful are all examples of good design and also represent good business practice.
The issue in question is the method of detecting engagement. When organizations design with engagement in mind, they should have a feedback loop that can distinguish between harmonious and obsessive engagement, not to halt engagement optimization, but to ensure that the optimization yields the type of engagement that fosters strong, lasting brand relationships rather than just temporary retention.
The feedback loop involves measuring a number of factors that most dashboards at present do not track: customer-reported well-being in relation to the product, the quality of advocacy as opposed to just its existence, the proportion of customer retention that remains after friction has been reduced, and the difference in behavior between those customers who chose to stay and those who found it difficult to leave.
The companies that incorporate this distinction into their approach to customer engagement are adopting a method that is structurally different from that of companies that do not. It is not necessarily more ethical, although it might be. It is more durable, more resistant to disruption by competition, and more likely to generate the type of customer relationships that build up over time rather than deteriorate as the switching-cost circumstances surrounding them change.
The relationship that appears most promising in this quarter's review is, in fact, the weakest in the portfolio. The frequency is genuine and so is the compulsion. What is not genuine, however, is the loyalty suggested by those figures.
The engagement boundary is the point at which further optimization begins to add captivity rather than value; most organizations have never identified it, and most engagement design systems lack a means to do so. It is important to eliminate that gap before the competitive environment forces it.
Some ideas are worth discussing in the context of your organization.
