Customer Value Analytics

Introduction

Please note that this is a preliminary course description. The final version will be published in June 2026.

We witness an increased emphasis on ensuring return on marketing investments and, thus, financial accountability of the marketing discipline. In this view, customers are assets that represent the firm's future profits and should be managed as such. This course exposes graduate students to this new role of marketing. It provides students with quantitative techniques to compute and understand customer value and the financial impact of customer relationship management and other marketing activities on this customer value and, ultimately, firm value.

Course content

A central aspect of this course is customer value and the impact of marketing activities. The course consists of lectures and an Excel assignment. It contains a substantial quantitative component, making it a reasonably advanced marketing analytics course. We cover topics such as customer selection, lifetime value and equity, managing customers as investments, customer base analysis, and the link between customer relationship management and customer value.