Customer Equity: Building and Managing Relationships As Valuable Assets [Hardcover]

Robert C. Blattberg (Author), Gary Getz (Author), Jacquelyn S. Thomas (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2001

What's a customer worth? The company that can answer this question precisely is the company with an edge in the customer-based, technology- and information-intensive economy of today. But how can an asset as intangible as customer value be measured? This timely book provides a solution: a fully developed, highly practical new marketing system for measuring and managing customer value as a financial asset - a system uniquely suited to today's rapidly changing, increasingly digital marketplace. How has the management - or mismanagement - of customer assets played into the successes, failures, at-risk status, or Cinderella stories of GM, Amazon, AOL Time Warner, FedEx, the U.S. Armed Forces, Oprah, Bluefly.com, and Harley Davidson?Drawing on these and other examples, the authors explain the strategies and tactics that make customer equity management work. They outline customer equity's three core strategies - customer acquisition, customer retention, and add-on selling - and the balance among them, and explain how the customer life cycle affects strategy and the marketing mix. Detailed, how-to chapters follow, clearly mapping out methods and practices for organizational restructuring, customer equity measurement, customer equity accounting, database management, and data analysis. Along with strategic and tactical guidance, "Customer Equity" provides precise metrics for evaluating a business more effectively and improving performance - the "activity-based management" of a company's marketplace. The authors present a new framework for structuring go-to-market activities that links those activities to useful metrics and allows better-informed marketing decisions.Marking a decisive move away from the traditional focus on mass marketing and brand equity, "Customer Equity" equips companies with the knowledge to manage customer portfolios across segments and over time, and gives marketers the means to lengthen customer life cycles, tailor the marketing mix, optimize cross-functional operations, and balance customer acquisition and retention. In doing so, "Customer Equity" enhances the ability of marketers, IT professionals, senior executives, and managers to make better decisions, generate higher profits, and increase shareholder wealth. Whether for its analysis of emerging marketing trends, blueprints for effective customer equity management, or practical advice and guidelines for implementing and using this new system, "Customer Equity" is the book companies and marketers must consult if they hope to acquire and retain the most attractive customers - and the competitive edge in today's marketplace.Robert C. Blattberg is a Professor at Northwestern's Kellogg Graduate School of Management in Chicago. Gary Getz is a Managing Principal at Integral, Inc. in Northern California. Jacquelyn S. Thomas is a Professor at Emory's Goizueta School of Business in Atlanta.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

"Customer Equity speaks to the most important business principle in the world: Manage your customer relationships as an asset. It's more than just a method, it's a complete system. The economics of this proposition are so compelling, one is shocked to note how few companies practice its disciplines. You had better put it to work, or your competitors will beat you to it."
-John Olsen, President and CEO, Marimba, Inc.

"You can bet that Customer Equity is going to be one of the key concepts Wall Street analysts will use to measure company performance. Blattberg, Getz, and Thomas provide a detailed description of how a firm can design and apply customer equity strategies that involve all components of their business. This is one of the most innovative books I've read in a long time."
-Jean-Michel Six, Senior Vice-President, WW Sales and Marketing, Giga Information Group

"This book provides a superb balance of powerful new concepts complemented by practical advice. It will help you define the issues, implement programs that will lead to success, and most importantly, provide the framework for measuring that success."
-Jay Istvan, Senior Vice President Strategy , eLoyalty Corporation.

"Customer Equity is a must-read for serious marketers. The authors have taken a holistic approach to the many facets of developing true client relationship management by citing relevant case studies from leading customer-driven companies. Practical and insightful!"
-Susanne Lyons, Chief Marketing Officer, Executive Vice President, The Charles Schwab Corporation

About the Author

Robert C. Blattberg is a Professor at Northwestern's Kellogg Graduate School of Management in Chicago.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 228 pages
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press; First Printing edition (July 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0875847641
• ISBN-13: 978-0875847641
• Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 1 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,325,800 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Another interesting book on customer equity June 27, 2001

By Christopher Wilcox

Format:Hardcover

Although there is not as much directly managerial material as in Rust et al.'s "Driving Customer Equity," this is still a thought-provoking read. I'm not sure the expenditure allocation stuff is really practical, but just thinking about things that way can be helpful.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Good book grounded in strong academic research June 25, 2001

By Dr. Naveen Donthu

Format:Hardcover

This book joins Rust's 'Driving Customer Equity' as a leading book on the topic of customer equity. Although quite different in approach to the Rust book, this book provides an interesting alternative approach to trading off acquisition vs. retention of customers.

12 of 16 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Somewhat disappointing July 18, 2001

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover

Customer equity is clearly the name of the game and a hot topic in the business world right now, but I was hoping for a more up-to-date treatment. This book offers some fairly useful, but comparatively well-known and mundane, material about managing customer acquisition and retention, but the content advances little beyond Blattberg's mid-1990s Harvard Business Review article. I suspect that the third author (Thomas) may have done much (all?) of the writing, because the other two are heavily occupied by their consulting practices. There is some really cutting edge work going on right now in the customer equity/customer lifetime value arena, but this book does not reflect most of it.