Are there economic benefits to improving customer satisfaction? Many firms that are frustrated in their efforts to improve quality and customer satisfaction are beginning to question the link between customer satisfaction and economic returns. The authors investigate the nature and strength of this link. They discuss how expectations, quality, and price should affect customer satisfaction and why customer satisfaction, in turn, should affect profitability; this results in a set of hypotheses that are tested using a national customer satisfaction index and traditional accounting measures of economic returns, such as return on investment. The findings support a positive impact of quality on customer satisfaction, and, in turn, profitability. The authors demonstrate the economic benefits of increasing customer satisfaction using both an empirical forecast and a new analytical model. In addition, they discuss why increasing market share actually might lead to lower customer satisfaction and provide preliminary empirical support for this hypothesis. Finally, two new findings emerge: First, the market's expectations of the quality of a firm's output positively affects customers’ overall satisfaction with the firm; and second, these expectations are largely rational, albeit with a small adaptive component.

Branding has emerged as a top management priority in the last decade due to the growing realization that brands are one of the most valuable intangible assets that firms have. Driven in part by this intense industry interest, academic researchers have explored a number of different brand-related topics in recent years, generating scores of papers, articles, research reports, and books. This paper identifies some of the influential work in the branding area, highlighting what has been learned from an academic perspective on important topics such as brand positioning, brand integration, brand-equity measurement, brand growth, and brand management. The paper also outlines some gaps that exist in the research of branding and brand equity and formulates a series of related research questions. Choice modeling implications of the branding concept and the challenges of incorporating main and interaction effects of branding as well as the impact of competition are discussed.brands, brand equity, brand extensions

No abstract

It is increasingly apparent that the financial value of a firm depends on off-balance-sheet intangible assets. In this article, the authors focus on the most critical aspect of a firm: its customers. Specifically, they demonstrate how valuing customers makes it feasible to value firms, including high-growth firms with negative earnings. The authors define the value of a customer as the expected sum of discounted future earnings. They demonstrate their valuation method by using publicly available data for five firms. They find that a 1% improvement in retention, margin, or acquisition cost improves firm value by 5%, 1%, and .1%, respectively. They also find that a 1% improvement in retention has almost five times greater impact on firm value than a 1% change in discount rate or cost of capital. The results show that the linking of marketing concepts to shareholder value is both possible and insightful.

The authors propose that the revenue premium a brand generates compared with that of a private label product is a simple, objective, and managerially useful product-market measure of brand equity. The authors provide the conceptual basis for the measure, compute it for brands in several packaged goods categories, and test its validity. The empirical analysis shows that the measure is reliable and reflects real changes in brand health over time. It correlates well with other equity measures, and the measure's association with a brand's advertising and promotion activity, price sensitivity, and perceived category risk is consistent with theory.