Customer equity as a firm’s valuation technique

Abstract

Return on marketing investment has received attention for a long period of time. On the other hand, customers and the value that they bring to a company have enjoyed increased attention lately. Concepts like customer obsession, customer life time value, customer delight, customer equity and other topics have been researched by a number of scholars. Customer equity as a marketing concept is the latest in marketing research. The concepts purport that management of a company should be able to calculate the value added to the company by its current and future customers. Such value is then discounted using the appropriate discount rate i.e. weighted average cost of capital (WACC). This research focused on the possibility of using Customer Equity to calculate enterprise value. The purpose was to determine whether any variance between results of the two methods is statistically significant and whether or not a relationship between CE based enterprise value and discounted cash flow (DCF) based enterprise value exist. From the analysis conducted it was concluded that no statistically significant variance existed between Customer Equity based enterprise value and DCF enterprise value. It was also noted that a relationship exist between customer equity and an enterprise value calculated using the DCF model. Copyright