Marc Wouters

2019

This paper gives an overview of existing literature on customer profitability (CP) in the form of a systematic literature review conducted in marketing journals; the marketing journals used were ranked from A+ to C by the German Academic Association for Business Research. The results show that the marketing literature has focused, in particular, on the handling of customers (for example, key account management) and the influence of customer characteristics and behaviour such as satisfaction or cross-buying on CP. Some approaches for handling customers according to their profitability as well as the influence of various marketing measures on CP are presented. The paper finally summarises ways in which CP can serve as a proxy for firm value and how CP, especially customer lifetime value (CLV), can be used for strategic management purposes.