سوابق و پیامدهای ارزیابی ارزش مشتری : مفاهیم استراتژی بازاریابی و پژوهش آینده

Customer value has turned out to be a very important concept in marketing strategy and research in spite of the fact that the growing body of knowledge about the construct is fragmented. Different points of view are advocated, and there seems to be no widely accepted way of pulling views together. This article highlights some of these conceptual problems, and a new understanding of the consumer's value assessments is suggested which is based on consumer value production within dynamic patterns of consumption. Implications of this understanding are then outlined for marketing strategy and future research.

Many authors have suggested that organizations ought to re-orient their strategies towards superior customer value (Webster, 1988; Day and Wesley, 1988; Deshpandé et al., 1993; Jaworsky and Kohli, 1993; Gale, 1994; Day, 1994; Slater and Narver, 1995; Woodruff, 1997). The suggestions typically refer to one or more of the following kinds of evidence: widely published success stories of companies which manage this way; data demonstrating a strong relationship between perceived quality, market share, and profitability; studies showing a positive relationship between market orientation and organizational performance; and analyses of costs demonstrating that customer retention is substantially less expensive than customer acquisition. This issue, therefore, does not seem to be whether superior customer value ought to be considered as an important challenge for marketing strategy, but rather how an organization ought to re-orient strategy towards the customer's value assessments. It is, therefore, not surprising that many contributions to consumer and marketing research reflect a growing interest in finding answers to this important question. However, these studies have not yet yielded any unambiguous interpretations with respect to the nature and antecedents of customer value, or of the normative implications for marketing strategy.

Customer value has turned out to be a very important concept in marketing strategy and research inspite of the fact that the growing body of knowledge about the concept is fragmented. Different points of view are advocated, and there seems to be no widely accepted way of pulling these views together. However, the ambiguity of the concept could be reduced, if it was accepted by marketing researchers and practitioners to a large extent that the consumers produce value, and that virtual and symbolic transformations of products can only be carried out by the consumers themselves. Organizations can help them to accomplish this task, and they ought to do so, if they want to compete on customer value delivery. Producing value by means of organizational offerings is always based on implemented lifestyles which are reproduced, modified, divested, or reconstructed. Market share, relative profits, and the investment of profits to sustain advantage therefore basically depend on the firm's ability and willingness to make superior contributions continuously to the consumer's production of value. By accepting such an approach to customer value it will be possible for marketing managers to change the focus of their strategies not only from the exit of the firm to the entrance of the household, but to the activities carried out by the consumers themselves in order to produce value. It will also be possible for firms to assess their competitiveness based on measurements which reflect their relative contribution to consumer production of value, instead of making comparisons only to alternative pre-purchase offerings independent of the consumers’ implemented lifestyles.