Allison Hartsoe’s book — The Age of Customer Equity — looks at customer-based strategy. She highlights examples of firms successfully using customer centric strategy. The examples are interesting and there is much to learn from the discussions. I should note that this is not an academic book. The concepts are much looser than I would…
Category: Customer Lifetime Value
Viewing Customers As Investments
Every now and then it is worth looking back at how earlier generations thought of marketing. (Or anything else really). There can be a lot to learn — although you often have to cope with some old-fashioned ideas and terminology. An interesting early piece is by Edward C. Bursk which was about viewing customers as…
Customer Equity Statements And Financial Reporting
Think of a brilliant move in soccer. The player shows great vision, and excellent passing. There is some fantastic build up play where lots of people are involved. The movement shows amazing promise and then someone slips and blasts the ball miles away from the goal. To my mind that is where we are in…
Stopping Undervaluing Customers Through Measurement
Rob Markey at Bain has had an interesting career. He clearly has done a lot right. He is an advocate for the importance of marketing in the c-suite. As such it is welcome when he weighs in to support important ideas. In a 2020 piece in the Harvard Business Review he laid out a plan…
Lost For Good And Always A Share Markets
I found Barbara Bund Jackson’s book through a citation in an old article. The book seems to be now out of print. The book was published in 1985, so being out of print is understandable given it is a bit dated. The examples tend to be about what IBM did in the 60s and 70s…
Adding Customers To Ratios
Marc Marshing has published a short book on using customer data in financial analysis. (I am assuming it was a dissertation or similar as it is closer to a paper than a traditional book). He talks about adding customers to ratios, specifically adding a measure of customer value to the price to book ratio. This…
Customer Accounting, Thanks But
It is great that accountants are looking at the idea of valuing a firm through its customers. I very much welcome this. That said, I do worry that people bringing ideas from outside their field often bring back bad habits with them. (To be clear I am sure I do this when looking at non-marketing…
Barriers To Implementing CLV
A lot of the early work on customer lifetime value (CLV) comes from the world of direct marketing. This makes sense given an obvious use of CLV is to manage a customer base. Using CLV you can help decide who to try and acquire, what your retention efforts should be, and who might be good…
The Origins Of Customer Equity
Customer equity is a concept that seems to have had its day in marketing. It arose, and it seems to me somewhat went away, relatively quickly. A 1996 article on the Harvard Business Review by Robert Blattberg and John Deighton lays out the idea of managing by a customer equity test. In many ways, this…
Understanding The Value Of Customers
Before CLV had become a big thing in marketing strategy Francis Mulhern looked at the challenge of understanding the value of customers. There are a lot of good points in the article. Measurement Problems In Understanding The Value Of Customers One of the most obvious challenges is that the data to allow us to understand…