I think the idea of using customer information in corporate valuation is a great one. As such, I am very receptive to work on customer-based corporate valuation. A 2005 paper in Management Decision I think well illustrates some of the challenges I have seen in this field. Lots of good ideas, some reasonable points, but…
Search Results for: metrics
The Right To Donate: A Critical View
Every now and then it’s useful to read something you have no clue what the author is talking about. I don’t mean you don’t understand the terminology or math. I mean you look at what they are saying, you register their meaning, and say, ‘huh?’ This is the reaction I got to Gordon Boyce’s ‘Valuing…
Customer Centricity And CLV
Peter Fader is a major figure in the study of customers. Specifically, he is closely linked to the idea of how companies value customers and focus on serving the customers that are most important to the firm. His 2019 book with Sarah E. Toms, The Customer Centricity Playbook, looks at customer centricity and CLV. The…
Customer Centricity And Customer Equity
Customer centricity is a very good book. It is short and has an excellent point. You could read it in a long bath despite there being much to learn from it. So what then can we learn about customer centricity and customer equity from Peter Fader’s book? A Strong Start And Clear View Of Customer…
Angel And Demon Customers
Larry Selden and Geoffrey Colvin had a book back in 2003 that made quite a stir. It introduced the idea of angel and demon customers. This was a catchy way of explaining the notion that not all customers are profitable. Indeed, Selden and Colvin argue that customers should not all be treated the same. What…
The Marketing Common Language Dictionary
I don’t retell many biblical stories but the Tower of Babel is a useful one. I admit I am probably not getting it perfect but the general story goes that everyone spoke different languages. It was, therefore, all a bit of a disaster. Think herding cats or clearing people out of a bar at the…
Treating Customers As Assets
There were several papers, and a book, that followed but Sunil Gupta and Donald Lehmann had a really interesting 2003 piece in the Journal of Interactive Marketing. This was about treating customers as assets. Much of the best ideas in this field are already on show there in this early paper. Marketing And Firm Value…
Customer Equity: Nice Idea, Bit Of A Mess In Execution
In the 1990’s/early 2000s great interest arose in how to understand marketing strategy and its financial impact in terms of customers. This was an extremely welcome occurrence. The concept of customer equity (CE) was developed. It is an interesting story, full of insightful comments. Sadly in some ways the whole thing became a bit of…
A Customer Equity Balance Sheet
The book, Customer Equity, is a bit of a classic in the marketing field. It is an early attempt to refocus companies from products to customers, specifically through measurement of the value of the customer base. The authors introduce a lot of interesting new ideas. They have many admirably big swings and, to be honest,…
Valuing Firms Through Their Customers
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…