“Leveraging Customer Information for Competitive Advantage.”

Internet and database technologies enable marketers to collect ever more extensive information on their customers' needs, preferences and past behaviors, but marketers often claim that they are challenged to make effective use of the information. Despite the substantial literature on market information utilization, the topic of customer information has received limited attention from marketing researchers. Does the generation and use of customer information lead to higher levels of customer satisfaction and improved firm performance? And do these relationships hold in general, or are there any environments under which these relationships are different? We seek to address this gap in the literature by i) developing the customer information management construct and ii) studying the effects of customer information management on customer satisfaction and firm performance. In this paper, we also examine the moderating effects of a firm's customer environments on the relationship between customer information management and customer satisfaction and performance respectively. Data from a national survey of 218 marketing executives provides strong support for a positive relationship between customer information management and customer satisfaction and firm performance that is robust to contexts characterized by varying levels of customer heterogeneity and customer relationship intensity. In sum, this research suggests that customer information is a knowledge asset that can be leveraged to improve firm performance.