Quem manda no calendário? (parte II)

Parte I.

Para gozo intelectual dos que seguem este blogue:

"It seems to be common sense that to increase profits, firms should prioritize customers (i.e., focus their efforts on the most important customers). However, such a strategy might have substantial negative effects on firms’ relationships with customers treated at a low priority level. Prior research does not indicate satisfactorily whether and how customer prioritization pays off. Moreover, although customer prioritization may be strongly present in firms’ marketing strategies, firms frequently fail to implement such a strategy. Therefore, it is also important to investigate empirically by which means firms can facilitate implementation. The authors address both issues and conduct a cross-industry study with 310 firms from business-to-consumer and business-to-business contexts together with two independent validation samples. The results show that customer prioritization ultimately leads to higher average customer profitability and a higher return on sales because it (1) affects relationships with top-tier customers positively but does not affect relationships with bottom-tier customers and (2) reduces marketing and sales costs. Furthermore, the ability to assess customer profitability, the quality of customer information, selective organizational alignment, selective senior-level involvement, and selective elaboration of planning and control all positively moderate the link between a firm’s prioritization strategy and actual customer prioritization.
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The results indicate that 83% of the firms in our sample intend to prioritize their customers to a high extent (i.e., having a mean rating across the items for “prioritization strategy” ≥5 on a seven- point scale). In contrast, only 38% indicate that they actually prioritize customers to a high extent (i.e., having a mean rating across the items for “customer prioritization” ≥5 on a seven-point scale). Thus, the descriptive results indicate a substantial implementation gap between intended and actual customer prioritization.
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Based on a cross-industry sample including B2B and B2C markets, our findings show that customer prioritization positively affects firm profits compared with treating all customers equally by two mechanisms. First, customer prioritization affects important customer relationship characteristics (customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and share of wallet) of top- versus bottom-tier customers differently. Whereas prioritizing customers affects average satisfaction of top-tier customers positively, the average satisfaction of bottom-tier customers is not negatively affected. Furthermore, average sales per customer are positively affected by top-tier customers’ average share of wallet. The latter is positively affected by customer prioritization through aver- age satisfaction and loyalty of this tier. However, for bottom-tier customers, this indirect effect of customer prioritization on average sales per customer through important relationship characteristics is not significant. Second, customer prioritization increases average customer profitability because the former reduces marketing and sales costs in relation to sales. This increased efficiency of marketing and sales efforts leads to higher average customer profitability."

Trechos retirados de "Customer Prioritization: Does It Pay Off, and How Should It Be Implemented?" de Christian Homburg, Mathias Droll, & Dirk Totzek, publicado por Journal of Marketing 110 Vol. 72 (September 2008).