Managing Customers as Investments

link to this entry | December 18th, 2006

Managing Customers as Investments – Sunil Gupta and Donald R. Lehmann, Wharton School Publishing, 2005

What can we say about two distinguished scholars who have the ability to immerse themselves in complex research investigations and at the same time, share their findings in ways that are relevant to everyday marketing and branding practitioners?

Gupta and Lehmann are respected academics who also happen to have deep ties to the Marketing Sciences Institute, an organization that we highly respect.

Managing Customers as Investments advances one of the best arguments on the subject to date by bridging the all-to-often ignored gap that exists between marketing and finance. While we have for some time accepted the notion that customers should be seen as assets, we have not yet commonly adopted the belief that programs designed to attract and retain customers should be treated as investments. We have also not embraced the real link between customer and shareholder value because we have been too transaction versus relationship-oriented in our thinking.

The authors provide us with a number of very informative and data-rich chapters that outline the steps to understanding the investment value of customers.

We especially like Chapters 5 and 6, which speak directly to the ways an organization can retool to become more customer-based. There’s a lot of practical, actionable advice that marketers will find useful here.

Entry Filed under: Recommended Reading