No abstract

Customer relationships represent a firm's most valuable assets. Within value-based management it is therefore crucial that customer relationships should be treated as assets or investments that need to be actively managed to maximize corporate value. However, (mono-)disciplinary approaches often do not explore the true economic potential of CRM. Therefore, this paper first presents the state of the art of CRM in academia and practice in general. Furthermore, specific challenges of a value-based CRM for the interaction between marketing, financial management, and IT are analyzed in detail. In addition to a mutual alignment of marketing and IT, the development of financial performance measures is crucial. Based on these measures and on an adequate IT support, the contribution of CRM to the corporate value can be measured and controlled.

No abstract

Online social networks have been gaining increasing economic importance in light of the rising number of their users. Numerous recent acquisitions priced at enormous amounts have illustrated this development and revealed the need for adequate business valuation models. The value of an online social network is largely determined by the value of its users, the relationships between these users, and the resulting network effects. Therefore, the interconnectedness of a user within the network has to be considered explicitly to get a reasonable estimate for the economic value. Established standard business valuation models, however, do not sufficiently take these aspects into account. Thus, we propose a measure based on the PageRank-algorithm to quantify users' interconnectedness in an online social network. This is a first but indispensible step towards an adequate economic valuation of online social networks.

Kundenbeziehungen spielen als zentraler Vermögenswert eines Unternehmens im Rahmen der wertorientierten Unternehmensführung eine bedeutende Rolle. (Mono)disziplinäre Herangehensweisen im Rahmen des CRM führen jedoch dazu, dass ökonomische Potenziale des CRM oft nicht entfaltet werden. Der vorliegende Beitrag stellt daher zunächst den State-of-the-Art des CRM in Literatur und Praxis im Allgemeinen dar. Des Weiteren werden die spezifischen Herausforderungen, die ein wertorientiertes CRM für das Zusammenwirken von Marketing, Finanzmanagement und IT in sich birgt, untersucht. Neben einer wechselseitigen Abstimmung von Marketing und IT ist dabei die Entwicklung von finanzwirtschaftlichen Kennzahlen erforderlich. Auf Basis dieser Kennzahlen und einer adäquaten IT-Unterstützung kann der Beitrag des CRM zum Unternehmenswert gemessen und gesteuert werden.