Customers as investment objects : a new perspective on marketing

Customers have always considered as one of the most important assets of a firm. The concept of Customer Equity (Rust, Zeithaml, Lemon, 2000) has given this idea a conceptual and methodological foundation. Marketing can then be seen as the attempt to maximize Customer Equity by corresponding activities. For doing this, we focus on the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and ways for its maximization. While the CLV has become a well-studied concept in marketing with a lot of literature coverage, much less work has been done in developing methods how to increase CLV. As an active increase in CLV always requires some activities, it is coupled with costs, and a cost-benefit analysis has to be made. We develop a new model for such a cost-benefit-analysis, by considering a customer as an investment object: A customer treatment incurs costs today, while, on the other hand, it generates returns in the future, over the lifecycle of the customer. Since a customer can receive different forms of treatment, there are in fact different investment options available. When trying to increase the CLV, these options have to be compared to each other. By formalizing this approach in a quantitative model, we create a framework for describing the cost-benefit profile of an individual customer. With this framework, optimum treatments can be identified, and the optimum height of investment into a single customer can be determined