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…
Category: Customers as Assets
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…
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…
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…
The Marketing Finance Partnership
Jim Meier, (an executive at MillerCoors), is an expert on getting marketing and finance to work together. Let’s call this the marketing finance partnership. He has written a fascinating chapter on the problems of doing this. Perceptions Of Marketing The portrayal of marketers through the eyes of finance people is amusing. Still, it isn’t pretty….
Market-Based Assets: An Important Idea
The concept of Market-Based Assets was introduced to tackle a major marketing (indeed business) problem. Many managers too often see marketing simply as an expense. By this logic marketing does not deliver, or at least is not expected to deliver, any long terms benefits. Being treated as an expense makes marketing a prime candidate to…
Good And Bad Profits
Fred Reichheld is best known for his (over) exuberant advocacy of the Net Promoter Score. Introducing Net Promoter he suggests a difference between good and bad profits; an interesting, though theoretically imprecise, idea. Are All Dollars In The Same? Short of outright fraud, isn’t one dollar of earnings as good as another? Certainly, accountants can’t…
