In their efforts to become more customer-focused, companies everywhere find themselves entangled in outmoded systems, metrics, and strategies rooted in their product-centered view of the world. Now, to ease this shift to a customer focus, marketing strategy experts Roland T. Rust, Valarie A. Zeithaml, and Katherine N. Lemon have created a dynamic new model they call "Customer Equity," a strategic framework designed to maximize every firm's most important asset, the total lifetime value of its customer base. The authors' Customer Equity Framework yields powerful insights that will help any business increase the value of its customer base. Rust, Zeithaml, and Lemon introduce the three drivers of customer equity -- Value Equity, Brand Equity, and Retention Equity -- and explain in clear, nontechnical language how managers can base their strategies on one or a combination of these drivers. The authors demonstrate in this breakthrough book how managers can build and employ competitive metrics that reveal their company's Customer Equity relative to their competitors. Based on these metrics, they show how managers can determine which drivers are most important in their industry, how they can make efficient strategic trade-offs between expenditures on these drivers, and how to project a financial return from these expenditures. The final section devotes two chapters to the Customer Pyramid, an approach that segments customers based on their long-term profitability, and an especially important chapter examines the Internet as the ultimate Customer Equity tool. Here the authors show how companies such as Intuit.com, Schwab.com, and Priceline.com have used more than one or all three drivers to increase Customer Equity. In this age of one-to-one marketing, understanding how to drive Customer Equity is central to the success of any firm. In particular, Driving Customer Equity will be essential reading for any marketing manager and, for that matter, any manager concerned with growing the value of the firm's customer base.

What's a customer worth? The company that can answer this question precisely is the company with an edge in the customer-based, technology - and information - intensive economy of today. But how can an asset as intangible as customer value be measured? This book provides a solution: a fully developed, highly practical new marketing system for measuring and managing customer value as a financial asset - a system uniquely suited to today's rapidly changing, increasingly digital marketplace. Along with strategic and tactical guidance, Customer Equity provides precise metrics for evaluating a business more effectively and improving performance - the "activity-based management" of a company's marketplace. The authors present a new framework for structuring go-to-market activities that links those activities to useful metrics and allows better-informed marketing decisions.

This book includes a practical framework with applied cases, and award-winning research.

One of the most important new concepts in marketing is customer equity—here’s the essential information you need to create and manage it! This book presents thought-provoking, cutting-edge writing on customer equity management. The editors and contributing authors are top international marketing researchers who share their expertise in this new area of marketing research and practice. Capturing Customer Equity: Moving from Products to Markets is designed to enable academics to chart out future research directions and to help marketers to apply recently developed frameworks to the creation and management of customer equity in domestic and international markets. Handy charts, tables, and figures make complex information easy to access and understand. Capturing Customer Equity: Moving from Products to Markets is divided into five chapters: Developing Relationship Equity in International Markets This chapter delves into the realm of relationship marketing to define the term relationship equity and presents strategies for enhancing relationship equity in international markets via personal relationships as well as consistent processes and outcomes. This chapter, written by the editors and their partner Arun Sharma, also looks at specific implications for relationship marketing theory and practice in international markets. Dimension and Implementation Drivers of Customer Equity Management (CEM)—Conceptual Framework, Qualitative Evidence, and Preliminary Results of a Quantitative Study This chapter explores theoretical considerations as well as qualitative and quantitative research applying confirmatory factor analysis. It identifies three important dimensions of Customer Equity Management (CEM)—analytical, strategic, and operational—as well as three types of CEM implementation drivers, which represent determinants of the three CEM dimensions. Authors Manfred Bruhn, Dominik Georgi, and Karsten Hadwich present the measures they’ve developed for the CEM dimensions and drivers. These measures provide valuable help to practitioners and academics who need to understand how to manage and implement systematic customer equity management. A Network-Based Approach to Customer Equity Management This chapter, by René Algesheimer and Florian von Wangenheim, moves beyond the dyadic relationship marketing concept to present a theoretical framework for extending current thinking on customer equity towards the network perspective. Based on the current literature in social work, this chapter examines the characteristics that are likely to be powerful predictors of a customer’s network value. Practical implications are highlighted, and directions for further research are suggested. Strategies for Maximizing Customer Equity of Low Lifetime Value Customers The management of customer equity has become a major issue for many firms. This chapter examines strategies designed to assist firms in their relationships with customers who have low lifetime value. By examining the relevant literature as well as industry strategies, author Arun Sharma explores the reasons why “transactional” and “discount” customers have largely been ignored by marketing strategists, and proposes methods to enhance segment penetration and the performance of firms. Implications for managers are also highlighted. Customer Value-Based Entry Decision in International Markets: The Cnocept of International Added Customer Equity Market entry decisions are some of a firm’s most important long-term strategic choices. Still, the international marketing literature has not yet fully incorporated the idea of relationship marketing in general, and the customer value concept in particular, as a basis for market entry decisions. This chapter, by Heiner Evanschitzky and Florian von Wange

The value of advertising has always been an effective way to increase consumerism among customers. Through the use of emotional branding, companies and organizations can now target new and old patrons while building a strong relationship with them at the same time, to ensure future sales. Driving Customer Appeal Through the Use of Emotional Branding is a critical scholarly resource that examines the responses consumers have to differing advertising strategies, and how these reactions impact sales. Featuring relevant topics such as multisensory experiences, customer experience management, brand hate, and product innovation, this publication is ideal for CEOs, business managers, academicians, students, and researchers that are interested in discovering more effective and efficient methods for driving business.