Let me start this post by saying that I have had good experiences with Qualtrics. I have used their survey panel services before, and would certainly do so again. (Assuming they want me as a customer after this blog post). Unfortunately their attempt to give advice on CLV is, let me use a technical British…
Category: Customer Lifetime Value
Management Accounting and Customer Recording
At least one area of marketing metrics makes me positive. The future is bright. The area is what we might call management accounting and customer recording. This tends to work best where there are contractual relationships. With contracts or, at least, stable long term connections, we can go a long way to understanding the value…
The Destiny of Accounting Measures of Customer Assets
In an optimistic piece Keiningham, Aksoy, and Bejou outline what they think the future of customer asset management is. What should be expect for accounting measures of customer assets? How will such assets be treated? Why Are Accounting Measures Of Customer Assets So Bad? They note three big problems which have meant that (prior to…
RFM: Recency, Frequency, Monetary
Database marketing has evolved over the years. Nowadays I would say that CLV (customer lifetime value) has surpassed RFM. CLV is certainly more often recommended by academics now. At least to assess the value of customers with predictable payments. It is a bit more challenging to know how to rank customers with less predictable payments…
What Is CLV For? Knowing Helps Decisions About CLV
Customer Lifetime Value is an important metric and it has potential to be valuable in running a wide range of companies. One thing that is useful with any approach is to say what is it for? So what is CLV for? This seems like too simple a question to be valuable but often that isn’t…
Don’t Expect Marketing Metrics To Be Magical
Michael Schrage tells us that customer lifetime value is a problematic measure but to me his criticisms seemed to be unreasonable. I have one message for him: Don’t Expect Marketing Metrics to be Magical. Overegging His Critique Firstly, I think he may be overegging his critique for effect. We might all have sympathy with that….
Don’t Use One Industry To Create Examples For CLV (Customer Lifetime Value)
Lloyd Melnick has a short and snappy book on customer lifetime value (which he terms LTV). At its best this is a useful insight into the games industry. There is a lot of detail there in a very easy to read form. For example, you will learn about ARPU (Average Revenue per User) and ARPDAU…
The Benefits And Challenges Of Customer Valuation
V. Kumar is probably the most published author in marketing (strategy). (2021 update, he is in the premier journals see here). He was editor of the Journal of Marketing (JM) until recently and is best known for his work in customer-based marketing analysis. In a piece in JM he outlines a number of ideas and…
More On CLV: A Lot Of Bad Advice Out There
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is widely discussed in marketing. Unfortunately, given marketers rarely refer to anyone else’s ideas this just leads to lots of people having their own view. This means when one looks up CLV online you are very likely to get a view of the metric that may, or may not, make sense. You want more on…
Teaching CLV Badly
Ex-Ivey PHD student and now University of Calgary professor, Charan Bagga, and I have just published an article. This focused on the teaching of CLV (Customer Lifetime Value). We surveyed the state of case-based teaching materials related to CLV and found them a pretty shoddy bunch. Teaching CLV badly seems to be the default way to teach…