From the Back Cover
Praise for Managing Customers As Investments
"Gupta and Lehmann have brilliantly brought together the customer and financial views of marketing. Astonishingly, many companies struggle to recall that cash comes from customers and that marketing is the sourcing and harvesting of that cash. Gupta and Lehmann provide the theory and practice for marketers and CFOs alike. Bravo!"
—Tim Ambler, London Business School and author, Marketing and the Bottom Line, Second Edition
"This book proves the adage that nothing is as practical as a good theory. The concept of lifetime value of a customer is presented in a straightforward and very practical way that will be extremely useful to marketers who are charged with improving financial accountability and managing ROI. It gives the reader enough information to get started with readily available data to understand how to think about and how to take action on customer management issues. The notion that it's better to be 'vaguely right, than precisely wrong' is just the right thing for companies that know they need to move on these issues but are struggling to get results. I strongly recommend this book for marketers who want to get more effective at customer management. The methods introduced in this book are important building blocks for a long-term testing and learning process to improve business performance."
—Gordon Wyner, Executive Vice President,
North American Strategy, Millward Brown, Inc. Chair, Executive Committee, Marketing Science Institute
"Gupta and Lehmann have written a rigorous, yet practical, guide to a complex and important area of timely importance to all senior executives; namely, how to manage customers profitably. This book shows effectively that the responsibility for managing customers is a cross-enterprise responsibility."
—Anil Menon, Vice President
IBM Marketing Strategy and Worldwide Marketing Management
"For all those managers discussing how they would use client lifetime value...if they only had the information...this book answers that question and more. The text is thoughtful and explicit on how you can actually produce an effective valuation—and without all the detailed information that has traditionally been required. The authors deliver a researched formula and methodology and also demonstrate how best to manage this information and relevant analyses for profitable growth with improved new metrics. And they provide practical examples and case studies for decision-making using this new information. Managing Customers as Investments offers the roadmap and toolkit to shorten the trip to greater customer management insight."
—Cathy F Burrows, Director,
Enterprise Information & Customer Management Support RBC Centura Bank
Managing Customers as Investments provides a comprehensive, accessible, and practical guide to understanding and managing customers in today's complex marketing environment. It offers managers in-depth insight into calculating customer lifetime value (CLV) and using CLV to improve a company's bottom line. Furthermore, it provides practical tools such as the "two sides of customer value" framework that managers can actually use to identify priority customers and a step-by-step approach to what it takes to become a customer-centric organization."
—John E. Forsyth, Partner
McKinsey & Company
It's more important than ever for companies to objectively assess the value of their customers. But conventional measures of "customer lifetime value" haven't been linked to overall business value and haven't been useful to senior managers. Managing Customers as Investments overcomes both shortcomings.
Through practical examples and case studies, you'll learn a rigorous yet simple approach to estimating the lifetime value of your customers—and how you can use that information to make better tactical and strategic decisions. You'll learn how customer value calculations impact customer acquisition, service, retention, and segmentation—as well as strategic M&A and alliance decisions.
Whether you're a CxO, line-of-business manager, marketer, analyst, or investor, Managing Customers as Investments will help you focus your resources where they'll deliver maximum value.
Key takeaways include
Customers are assets
How to calculate the value of customers in a simple way
How the value of customers provides the basis for marketing strategy and planning
The importance of balancing the value of the customer to the firm with the value the firm provides to the customer
How to use the value of the customer as a basis for firm valuation and M&A decisions
The implications for organization and incentive structure and the limitations of product and brand management
How to link customer value to business value
Practical techniques for CxOs, line-of-business managers, marketers, financial analysts, and investors
How to make better decisions about marketing, partnerships, and organizational structure
Easy-to-use metrics and real-world case studies
What your customers are really worth: crucial knowledge for better strategic and tactical decision-making
How can you find out, without endlessly complex modeling? And after you know, what should you do with that knowledge?
Managing Customers as Investments has the answers—and they may surprise you.
You'll learn surprisingly simple ways to get reliable customer value information...and get it in a form you can use.
You'll learn how to use it to measure your marketing effectiveness more accurately than ever before—and drive improvements throughout your entire customer relationship lifecycle.
You'll learn how customer value can bring new clarity to decisions about M&A and firm valuation.
Everyone tells you to manage your business around customers. This book gives you the tools to do it.
© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Managing Customers as InvestmentsAbout the Authors
Sunil Gupta is Meyer Feldberg Professor of Business at the Columbia Business School, Columbia University, New York, where he has taught since 1990. He has also taught at UCLA and the Harvard Business School; conducted seminars and consulted with companies worldwide; appeared on CNN, BBC, and PBS; and quoted in publications including The New York Times, The Financial Times, and The Washington Post.
Gupta's expertise is in marketing strategy, pricing, and customer management. He has published extensively on these topics. His research papers have won several awards, including the O'Dell and Paul Green awards for the Journal of Marketing Research and the best paper awards for the International Journal of Research in Marketing and Marketing Science Institute. He serves on the editorial boards of International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, and Marketing Science.
He is the cofounder and President of the EX Group, a strategic consulting group that specializes in customer management. He is also an academic trustee of the Marketing Science Institute. He holds an MBA from Indian Institute of Management and a Ph.D. from Columbia University.
Donald R. Lehmann is George E. Warren Professor of Business at the Columbia Business School, Columbia University, New York. His research interests include modeling individual and group choice and decision-making, empirical generalizations and meta-analysis, the introduction and adoption of new products and innovations, and measuring the value of marketing assets such as brands and customers. He has taught courses in marketing, management and statistics at Columbia and has also taught at Cornell, Dartmouth, New York University, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Lehmann has published in and served on the editorial boards of Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Management Science, and Marketing Science and was founding editor of Marketing Letters. His books include Market Research and Analysis, Analysis for Marketing Planning, Product Management, and Meta-Analysis in Marketing.
He served as Executive Director of the Marketing Science Institute and as President of the Association for Consumer Research. He is the recipient of many awards including the 2000 Paul D. Converse award and the AMA McGraw Hill-Irwin distinguished marketing educator award. He holds an M.S.I.A. and Ph.D. from the Krannert School of Purdue University.
© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.
Home
