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t from two anonymous referees of Management Decision.
Customer value
645
Management Decision
Vol. 42 No. 5, 2004
pp. 645-666
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0025-1747
DOI 10.1108/00251740410538497
reported that they had been “satisfied” or “very satisfied” on the last satisfaction
survey prior to their defection. Heskett et al. (1997) report that a study of retail bank
depositors found that completely satisfied customers were 42 percent more likely to be
loyal than merely satisfied customers. Reichheld and Sasser (1990) report that Xerox
found that its completely satisfied customers were six times more likely to repurchase
a Xerox product or service than its merely satisfied customers. The literature shows
that loyalty and profits are strongly linked to value created for customers. Customers
are loyal to a company as long as it offers them superior value compared to its
competitors.
The concept of value, however, is one of the most overused and misused concepts in
social sciences in general and in management literature in particular (Leszinski and
Marn, 1997). It is used in diverse fields such as finance, economics, management,
information systems, ethics, aesthetics, justice, social equity and fairness, etc.
(Normann, 2001; Wikstrom and Normann, 1994). Further, value is discussed in many
streams of marketing literature- including: relationship marketing, pricing, and
consumer behavior – in total quality management literature, and strategy literature
(see de Chernatony et al., 2000).
This paper attempts to synthesize and extend the literature on the subject. It pulls
together different streams of research and tries to incorporate them into a more useful,
practical, and coherent framework. It endeavors to build an integrative configuration of
the concept of customer value that reflects its richness and complexity. The aim is to
make the customer value concept more helpful in designing of and studying service
offerings and in developing competitive strategies.
The remainder of this paper is divided into six sections. The following section sets
the context by exploring three categories of value in management literature. Next, three
models, prevailing the field of customer value, are explored. Then, the concept of
customer value is presented in three interdependent and interrelated models that are
put together in the following section as parts of an integrated configuration. The
managerial implications of the new integrative configuration are presented next
followed by directions for further research. The paper ends with a conclusion
summarizing its main ideas.
Categories of value
The management literature on value is clustered generally around three categories of
value: financial economists advocate shareholder value, marketers advance customer
value, and stakeholder theorists promote stakeholder value (see Reichheld, 1994).
Customer value, however, is the source of all other values (Treacy and Wiersema, 1995;
Hammer, 1996; Heskett et al., 1994; Lemon et al., 2001).
The concept of shareholder value is well developed within the finance literature
driven by the increasing power and influence of financial markets (Payne et. al., 2000;
Koller, 1994; Wenner and LeBer, 1989; Stewart, 1991; Slater and Olsen, 1996; Bannister
and Jesuthasan, 1997; and Dobbs and Coller, 1998). According to Rappaport (1