سودآوری مشتری: رویکردهای آینده نگر در برابر گذشته نگر در محیط تجارت بنگاه به بنگاه

The research question pertains to the development of a comprehensive model of customer profitability. In developing such a model, we rely upon the links between quality, customer satisfaction, loyalty, and profitability established in the literature in marketing and accounting, and place them into the business-to-business context. We maintain that customer profitability is expandable in three directions, two temporal and one spatial. The two temporal directions, represented by retrospective and prospective approaches, are discussed and analytically specified. The third direction is conceptualized as an ever-growing customer pool of “delighted” customers that become an advertising medium for the firm and its products (services). Implications of the three-dimensional model of customer profitability for the management control system are offered.

Modern marketing managers are determined to use accounting information in order to create customer value. They attempt to direct the strategic focus by conducting customer revenue and customer cost analyses and, thereby, building customer profitability profiles [1]. Foster [2] states that: The ‘why?’ of customer profitability analysis can be reduced to the simple statement that each dollar of revenues does not contribute equally to net income. Differences in customer profitability can arise from either differences in revenue or differences in cost [2, p. 5]. Customer-profitability profiles help to pinpoint the contribution of each customer (or set of customers) to the total profitability. The interests of the leading customers can then be emphasized in developing new products as well as in delivering existing products. These profiles also facilitate identifying “the least profitables,” customers for whom the cost of serving them exceeds the associated gross margin.1 Limited academic research related to the measurement of customer profitability and management control issues exists today. Customer profitability has been explored by academics in the areas of marketing and accounting from different perspectives. Marketing literature suggests that “ … marketing is concerned with the task of developing and managing market-based assets … that arise from the comingling of the firm with entities in the external environment” which include customer relationships [3, p. 1]. Cost accounting literature has concentrated on measuring customer revenues and customer costs and building their taxonomies within Activity-Based Costing 1 and 2. Among the properties of customer-profitability analysis, emphasis is placed on such features as allowing the measurements to cut across the entire value chain, encompassing multiple transactions in multiple periods and selectivity in the scope of customer-specific analysis (aggregate vs. narrow). Others suggest that emphasis on dimensions of “product,” “price” and “responsiveness” be correlated with future sales [4, p. 37]. The literature in marketing and cost accounting suggests the need for responses to at least four major challenges. To ascertain usefulness of customer profitability analysis the following problems must be solved: (1) development of reliable customer revenue and customer cost figures; (2) recognition of future downstream costs of customers (environmental, litigation, warranty, etc); (3) incorporation of multiple periods into the analysis, and; (4) recognition of different drivers of customer costs [1]. In responding to these challenges, proposals consider several factors that highlight potential benefits from allocating resources across customers. These factors include: (1) levels of the short-run and long-run customer profitability; (2) likelihood of customer retention; (3) potential for customer growth and customer's industry growth; (4) increases in the overall demand from having well-known customers, and; (5) use of customers as a source of ideas about new products and/or ways to improve existing products. The purpose of this research is to extend the literature in accounting and marketing by developing a more comprehensive model of customer profitability. In accomplishing this task, the literature that links quality, satisfaction, loyalty, and profitability is relied upon and extended into a business-to-business marketing context.2 Customer profitability is conceptualized as expanding in at least three directions: two temporal and one spatial. After building the model, managerial and control implications of this more complete model are discussed. This approach is limited to theoretical specification of the measurement model as empirical testing of the model is underway. The conceptual development of customer profitability is organized as follows. The next section presents retrospective and prospective theories of customer profitability and their analytical specifications. Additionally, contemporary research in marketing that investigates the nature and strength of the link between customer expectations, quality of the product, and customer satisfaction is reviewed. Section three develops the idea of future sales influenced by a customer in the form of an ever expanding profitability stream and makes a point that “delighted” customers, and particularly those impacted by “unnoticeables,” may become an advertising medium for the firm and its products (services) [8]. The fourth section discusses management control issues related to the accomplishment of marketing strategies implied in the proposed model of customer profitability. The final section provides a summary of propositions and offers implications for future research and for business-to-business marketing practice and its control. Retrospective and prospective theories of customer profitability The extant literature in accounting and marketing provides significant discussion and theory construction regarding the dimensions of customer profitability. The theoretical discussions can be categorized into a “retrospective” or “prospective” conceptualization of customer profitability. The retrospective is a historical perspective; it investigates what has been the absolute and relative profitability of each customer or customer group over some defined past time period. The “prospective” view focuses on the future and asks “what will be the profitability of each customer or customer group?”

The measurement of customer profitability, as described in our model (Eq. 5), is necessary to assess the achievement of marketing strategies related to customer retention and to increasing market share. Without these measures, resources cannot be properly directed which implies that firm value may not be optimized. Thus, the framework of Srivastava et al. [3] is continued by attempting to make “explicit the contributions of marketing to shareholder value” [3, p. 3]. Therefore, the prospective measurement of customer profitability is a necessary pre-requisite to the efficient utilization of resources and vital to directing marketing efforts toward building customer value by taking strategic advantage of the relatively efficient market for product information. Perhaps the most important implication of the use of prospective measures of customer profitability is the likely influence on the marketing function and ultimately on the entire organization. The use of forward- looking measures of profitability can create a “planning culture” within marketing which allows their focus to shift from the past to the future. This shift in thinking has the potential for empowerment as the focus shifts forward and it becomes clear that decisions and actions can make the future remarkably different from the past. That is, it is informative that a customer may have been relatively unprofitable in the past; however, it is more informative that creative and proactive intervention may turn that relationship around and make it beneficial to both the buyer and the seller. This is the challenge, to make the future and not allow it to unfold.19