The basic idea of valuing a firm through its customers is an excellent one. There was a collection of works looking to do this early in the millennium. This was partly motivated by the challenges of the dot-com boom. In this boom firms had high valuations but low profit (or more likely losses). The valuation…
Category: Customer Lifetime Value
What Drives Customer Equity?
Around the turn of the millennium, there was a lot of interest in the idea of customers as financially relevant. Thus work started to concentrate on the idea of customer equity. Customer equity was sometimes equated with the idea of customers as assets. This is an important aim (even though I have some measurement quibbles)….
A Unified Theory Of Marketing
One of the challenges with marketing is that there are so many bits that don’t fit together. As such let me put on record that I appreciate the potential for customers to be put at the center of all the marketing approaches. CLV, the value of a customer to the firm, has potential for a…
Simple Marketing Metrics Good. Too Simple CLV Not So Good
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…
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 we expect for accounting measures of customer assets? How should we expect such assets to be treated in the future? Why Are Accounting Measures Of Customer Assets So Bad? They note three big problems….
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 (including me) nowadays. (CLV certainly works best with predictable payments. It is a bit more challenging to know how to rank customers with less predictable payments patterns). An…
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…
