In this article, the author addresses the question of how a firm’s acquisition efforts influence the composition of the customer portfolio. The first part of the research is a conceptual model that illustrates how customer uncertainty provides an explanation for why promotionally acquired customers have lower repurchase rates and smaller lifetime values. The second part of the research involves...

Business executives can answer such questions by focusing on customer equity—the total of the discounted lifetime values of all the firm’s customers. A strategy based on customer equity allows firms to trade off between customer value, brand equity, and customer relationship management. We have developed a new strategic framework, the Customer Equity Diagnostic, that reveals the key drivers inc...

INTRODUCTION The lifetime value of a customer is an important and useful concept in interactive marketing. Courtheaux (1986) illustrates its usefulness for a number of managerial problems—the most obvious if not the most important being the budgeting of marketing expenditures for customer acquisition. It can also be used to help allocate spending across media (mail vs. telephone vs. television)...

The shareholder value and the customer lifetime value approach are conceptually and methodically analogous. Both concepts calculate the value of a particular decision unit by discounting the forecasted net cash flows by the risk-adjusted cost of capital. However, virtually no scholarly attention has been devoted to the question if any of the components of the shareholder value could be determin...

Central to a firm’s growth and marketing policy is the revenue and profit potential of its customer assets. As a result, there has been a recent proliferation of work regarding customer lifetime value. However, extant research in this area is silent regarding how to assess the profitability of customers in a networked setting. In such settings, the presence of one type of customer can affect th...

Due to the rapid development of technology in recent years, market competition and customer expectations have increased more than ever. In this situation, it is vital for businesses survival to determine the appropriate policy for inventory control, pricing, and routing, and decisions regarding each of them are often made separately. If the products have a perishable nature, it will be more imp...