• Title: Managing Customers as Investments: The Strategic Value of Customers in the Long Run
• Author: Sunil Gupta / Donald Lehman
• Publisher: Wharton School Publishing

Have you ever thought of managing your customer portfolio the same way you would manage your investment portfolio? Do you know with absolute certainty which customers are really worth keeping for their potential life-cycle in the company? Do you want to know who those customers are without having to resort to complex and sophisticated modeling processes? These are some of the questions formulated and responded to by Columbia Business School professors Sunil Gupta and Donald Lehman.

Apart from the Columbia Business School, Gupta has been a professor at Harvard and UCLA, while David Lehman has directed the Marketing Science Institute and has been president of the Association for Consumer Research.

The profitability of Marketing Strategies is the foundation of the book, which questions many of the practices currently undertaken by companies in their actions aimed at customers.

Strategic and Profitable Marketing

The objective the authors pursue is to support companies in the design of Sales and Marketing Strategies that focus on the customer, not as a “fashionable philosophy”, but rather as an authentic corporate asset, capable of offering a return on the investment put into it, which many companies are wasting.

While current management trends unanimously defend the theory that the customer must be at the center of the business strategy and, at the same time, increase the company’s growth and profitability, Professors Gupta and Lehman focus on the “how”, beyond mere theory. Developing Sales and Marketing Strategies focused on the customer’s life-cycle and always keeping their value in mind is the guiding premise for this work, published by the prestigious Wharton School Publishing.