What's a customer worth? The company that can answer this question precisely is the company with an edge in the customer-based, technology - and information - intensive economy of today. But how can an asset as intangible as customer value be measured? This book provides a solution: a fully developed, highly practical new marketing system for measuring and managing customer value as a financial asset - a system uniquely suited to today's rapidly changing, increasingly digital marketplace. Along with strategic and tactical guidance, Customer Equity provides precise metrics for evaluating a business more effectively and improving performance - the "activity-based management" of a company's marketplace. The authors present a new framework for structuring go-to-market activities that links those activities to useful metrics and allows better-informed marketing decisions.

While diversity, equity, and inclusion issues are a focus of brand activism and many firms' corporate social responsibility initiatives, the challenge is that these topics either 1) impact a relatively small group of individuals (i.e., limited in scope) or 2) are emotionally charged or polarizing in nature. This makes it difficult for firms to determine if and when it is appropriate to respond to DEI events on social media. We use surveys and Twitter data to provide clarity on the effectiveness of DEI-related tweets as a social media strategy. By comparing DEI tweets with COVID-19 and political tweets we find that audiences feel that DEI and COVID-19 topics are appropriate to talk about, but that DEI issues have a significantly lower scope relative to other topics. Still, engagement is relatively high when a brand explicitly responds to a major social event, suggesting that the downside risks of discussing DEI events in social media are limited. In addition, DEI tweets appear most effective when used sporadically as they are more sensitive to topic saturation. Although this research is relatively exploratory in nature but, our findings provide useful guidelines and insights DEI brand activism.

The topic of standardization of international marketing programs is an important one faced by managers of global firms and has attracted significant research attention. Although previous research has established that standardization enhances performance outcomes, more recent theorizing suggests that this may not always be the case. However, empirical investigators have paid little systematic attention to moderating conditions. The major purpose of this article is to investigate the organizational factors that moderate the standardization-performance relationship and, thus, to explore the types of firm for which standardization is particularly beneficial. The authors examine survey data from 489 firms, and their results indicate that the standardization-performance link is significantly stronger for large firms with a homogeneous product offering, high levels of global market penetration, a cost leadership strategy, and strong coordination capabilities. The authors conclude that managers evaluating the adequacy of a standardization strategy should consider the list of contingencies advanced in this research.

As managers and academics increasingly raise issues about the real value of CRM, the authors question its direct and unconditional performance effect. The study advances research on CRM by investigating the role of critical mechanisms underlying the CRM-performance link. Drawing from the sources → positions → performance framework, the authors build a research model in which two strategic postures of firms - differentiation and cost leadership - mediate the effect of CRM on firm performance. This investigation also contributes to the literature by drawing attention to the differential impact of CRM in diverse industry environments. The study analyzes data from in-depth field interviews and a large-scale, cross-industry survey, and results reveal that CRM does not affect firm performance directly. Rather, the CRM-performance link is fully mediated by differentiation and cost leadership. In addition, CRM's impact on differentiation is greater when industry commoditization is high. Full text PDF available online.