The Empirical Study On The Customer Equity And Its Drivers

With the changing of customers'role, tense competition and the development of Information Technology, enterprises desiderate a practical concept of customer management. The existing Customer Relationship Management (abbreviated as CRM) is however far from ideal. It is known that the CRM has entered a new era—Customer Equity Management (abbreviated as CEM). Hence the customer equity has been a common concern both of academic and business communities, and researchers pay more and more attention on how to maximize the value of customer equity. In this thesis, the author studies customer equity and its drives, with the aim of remedying the inadequacies of CRM and guiding the business activities of the enterprises effectively.This thesis has done an empirical research on customer equity and its drives. The investigating target is the mobile communication enterprise of our country, namely China Mobile and China Unicom. Based on the existing literature and the marketing management practice of mobile communication enterprise, the author proposes a relationship hypothesis as well as a conceptual model between customer equity and its drives, carries on then the empirical study and draws the conclusion.The study shows that the value equity plays the most influential part on the recommendation value, takes the second place on the repetition purchase, and occupies the slightest influence on premium purchase and knowledge contribution. The brand equity has the pivotal influence on the customer equity, especially on the repetition purchase and the recommendation value. Moreover, it matters most in the drives of repetition purchase. Nevertheless, among the drives of premium purchase and recommendation value as well as knowledge contribution, the relationship equity is the most influential element. Some findings of this study are different from the former researches. For instance, predecessor's researches prove that brand equity has the vital influence on the premium purchase. This also shows the charm of the brand. Yet the study result does not reveal this point; this is possibly because that mobile communication industry is a special industry, which plays approximately a monopolistic role in our country. The price is almost a fixed industry level so that the consumers have no choice and thus there is no way to understand the premium purchase situation. Because of the similar reason, the study about the brand famousness also comes to the different conclusion from the former researches.