A conceptual framework for customer value management

Abstract

It is essential for a company to be engagement-oriented and analyze how marketing variables affect customer value and how it improves efficiency in both customer attraction and retention. But a comprehensive, integrated assessment of all marketing variables and their interdependencies is an arduous and complex task and thereby, an unsettled issue. Using relationship marketing literature as the theoretical basis of this research, this study overviews marketing variables empirical research, from a customer value perspective. First, we describe the most relevant relationships between each variable and customer value. Then we present a structured framework of the relationships observed between the variables. Lastly, we give some guidelights to manage marketing variables in a unitary manner, considering that the strategies and budgets for attraction and retention should be carried out jointly. The resulting framework shows that customer value is necessarily achieved over customer lifetime, and mainly through four clear predictors: perceived value, purchase intention, satisfaction and switching costs. Such framework can be used by entrepreneurs and marketing managers as a roadmap to customer value that facilitates understanding the significance of marketing variables predicting customer value and their underlying relations.