Customer Equity Modeling

Customer equity modeling treats a firm's customers as financial assets and defines the value of the firm's customer base as the sum of the discounted lifetime values of its current and future customers. The idea was crystallized by Robert Blattberg and John Deighton, who proposed managing marketing by the 'customer equity test,' asking of any initiative whether it will grow customer equity, and who showed how to balance spending between acquiring new customers and retaining existing ones. Roland Rust, Katherine Lemon and Valarie Zeithaml extended the framework into a strategic, driver-based model, decomposing customer equity into value equity (objective perceptions of quality, price and convenience), brand equity (subjective and emotional brand perceptions) and retention equity (the strength of the customer relationship and loyalty programs). Their 'Return on Marketing' approach links each marketing action through these drivers to brand-switching probabilities, to changes in lifetime value, and ultimately to the change in customer equity it produces, so competing strategies can be compared on projected financial return. Customer equity modeling thus connects customer-level analytics to firm-level valuation and budget allocation, providing a common currency for marketing decisions.