Customer Equity: Building and Managing Relationships as Valuable Assets

by Gary Getz, Robert C. Blattberg, Jacquelyn S. Thomas

Book Overview

Customer Equity provides a unifying framework for measuring customer value - the potential profitability of each customer to the company - as a financial asset and defines and shows how to implement... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0875847641
• ISBN13: 9780875847641
• Release Date: July 2001
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Length: 228 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

First rate and highly practical

Want to know about customer equity this is it, the definitive guide. Full of enough detail to put into practice, a revelation of a business book. The central idea of a customer as an asset is clearly explained - with actual calculations! Then a framework is developed for putting the central idea into practice. Almost unique amongst modern business books, this one shows you how to do something difficult in practice, it takes the trouble to show enough detail without being boring. For more on same theme, try: - Marketing and the Bottom Line (ISBN: 0273661949) - Marketing Payback (ISBN: 0273688847)

An Important Perspective on ROI

This subject is more often discussed than adequately understood. The authors of this book make a substantial contribution to our understanding of what customer equity is, why it is so important, how it can be created, how and why it should be leveraged, and how it can be increased. I commend them for beginning their book with "Customer Management: A Quiz." This requires the reader to test her or his knowledge by answering a series of questions, with answers to those questions provided in the chapters specified. The material is carefully organized within three Parts: A New Marketing System, Customer Strategies, and Managing by Customer Equity. The authors then provide an excellent appendix in which they address "Issues in Computing Customer Equity." They agree that you can't manage what you can't measure...or compute.As explained in the Acknowledgments section, this book is the result of a process which began in 1975 when Blattberg "became aware of the value of the power and elegance of the concept of lifetime value of a customer." He and associates refined the concept within a business context to optimize the value of their customers through acquisition and retention processes. Years later, after a period of incubation, the concept was refined even more as a result of Blattberg's collaboration with Getz and Thomas, co-authors with him of this book whose basic premise is that "the customer is a financial asset that companies and organizations should measure, manage, and maximize just like any other asset." Customer equity management (CEM) is more than just a method for calculating the asset value of customer relationships. "It is a total marketing system" which requires integrative business strategies "that simultaneously manage products [and/or services] and customers throughout the customer life cycle and that reframe brand and product strategies within the context of their effects on customer equity."As the authors explain, their book was written for CEOs and chief strategy officers, CFOs and accounting executives, marketing and sales executives, chief information officers, chief technology officers, human resources executives and knowledge officers as well as for account executives, public relations specialists, alumni officers, political representatives, clinical trial officers, not-for-profit managers, recruiters -- "in fact for anyone serving a valuable constituency." To the authors' list I presume to add CEOs of small-to-midsize privately-held companies and consultants who are privileged to serve any of those previously listed. The nature and extent of the book's value will obviously vary from one group to another; indeed, from what anyone within any one of the groups may need now and what she or he may need later. The authors provide what, in effect, is a cohesive, comprehensive, and cost-effective system by which to create and maximize customer equity. In process, there are dozens (hundreds?) of value-added benefits to be derived. The li

Another interesting book on customer equity

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.

Good book grounded in strong academic research

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.

Robert Blattberg is the guru of value management

Robert Blattberg has written a superb account on effectively managing customer relationships. At a time when CRM has been highly proclaimed as a solution towards improving customer relationships - we still struggle with how to actually measure and manage the effectiveness of those efforts, and how to frame the problem. With this book, and as a continuation of Dr. Blattberg's expertise on this subject, he has provided us with a very practical and essential framework for making the right decisions, based on the right measures of marketing efficacy and economic returns. I recommend it highly for those executives working in marketing, finance and strategic planning.