Management and Marketing - Research Publications
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ItemSatisfaction, complaint, and the stock value gap(SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2008-07-01)
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ItemCustomer prioritization: Does it pay off, and how should it be implemented?(SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2008-09-01)It seems to be common sense that to increase profits, firms should prioritize customers (i.e., focus their efforts on the most important customers). However, such a strategy might have substantial negative effects on firms’ relationships with customers treated at a low priority level. Prior research does not indicate satisfactorily whether and how customer prioritization pays off. Moreover, although customer prioritization may be strongly present in firms’ marketing strategies, firms frequently fail to implement such a strategy. Therefore, it is also important to investigate empirically by which means firms can facilitate implementation. The authors address both issues and conduct a cross-industry study with 310 firms from business-to-consumer and business-to-business contexts together with two independent validation samples. The results show that customer prioritization ultimately leads to higher average customer profitability and a higher return on sales because it (1) affects relationships with top-tier customers positively but does not affect relationships with bottom-tier customers and (2) reduces marketing and sales costs. Furthermore, the ability to assess customer profitability, the quality of customer information, selective organizational alignment, selective senior-level involvement, and selective elaboration of planning and control all positively moderate the link between a firm's prioritization strategy and actual customer prioritization.
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ItemManaging Dynamics in a Customer Portfolio(SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2009-09-01)Although highly relevant for marketing practice, few studies provide conceptual and empirical insights into customer portfolio management. Furthermore, most approaches to analyzing customer portfolios are static. This article discusses three neglected key issues relevant for a dynamic customer portfolio analysis: (1) Does a static versus a dynamic valuation lead to a different prioritization of customer segments in a portfolio? (2) How does offensive or defensive management of segment dynamics affect portfolio value? and (3) Do reliable predictors for dynamics of a customer's position in the portfolio exist? As a tool for customer portfolio analysis, the authors develop a segment-based customer-lifetime-value model. They capture customer dynamics by analyzing how customers switch between segments of different values across time. The authors apply their tool with longitudinal data from four firms with up to 300,000 customers. The results from the empirical analysis and a simulation study provide answers to the three key issues raised. First, compared with a dynamic analysis, a static approach overestimates the value of some customer segments but underestimates others. Second, a defensive versus offensive management of value dynamics is relatively more appropriate for middle-tier segments, whereas the opposite holds true for bottom-tier segments. Third, general customer characteristics and aggregated transaction characteristics indicate future segment dynamics, whereas specific product usage data differentiate customers according to current value.
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ItemImplementing the Marketing Concept at the Employee-Customer Interface: The Role of Customer Need Knowledge(SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2009-07-01)
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ItemSocial Identity and the Service-Profit Chain(SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2009-03-01)The conventional service-profit chain (SPC) proposes that a firm's financial performance can be improved through a path that connects employee satisfaction, customer orientation, customer satisfaction, and customer loyalty. In this article, a complementary SPC that is built on both a conventional path and a social identity-based path is introduced. The latter SPC path centrally builds on customer- and employee-company identification as a core construct. Using a large-scale triadic data set that includes data from employees, customers, and firms, the authors find strong support for the extended SPC, which accounts for important customer (loyalty and willingness to pay) and firm (financial performance) outcomes. In addition, the effects of company identification exist incrementally beyond the effects of the conventional SPC path.