Research On Customer Equity Measurement Under Social Network Perspective

In the era of market-oriented economy, the competition among enterprises risesgreatly and the products or services for customers to choose are so numerous thatcustomers’ visions have become extremely picky, so it makes enterprises have to carryout business activities around customers. Enterprises not only struggle to attract newcustomers, but also try their best to retain old customers. Because of it, the status of thecustomers gradually shifts from the past followers into the present masters. With theimprovement of emphasis on the customers, the concept of equity has been graduallyextended to the customer level, called Customer Equity. In order to enable enterprises tobetter guide their marketing practices, to accurately measure the value of CustomerEquity is essential. Most of the current studies measures it under the perspective of asingle two-way relationship between enterprises and customers. But in fact, the value ofCustomer Equity is still affected by their social networks, which is the starting point ofthis paper.Firstly, We descript the theory and elaborate the Customer Equity drivers under thesocial network perspective. Secondly, We summarize the existing measurement modelsand compare with them, meanwhile, analyze the cause of measuring Customer Equityunder social network perspective. Then, base on it, We improve Marketing RevenueModel to build up the Customer Equity measurement model under the social networkperspective, embedding the four-level network of relationships in which enterprises andcustomers into it and taking into the condition of changes in the size of the mutativedemand market. The model retains the core idea and all the benefits of MarketingRevenue Model and re-interpretates the problem of Customer Equity measurement fromthe situation closer to the reality. Finally, We select the supermarket as the object ofstudy and apply it into demonstration, obtaining data from questionnaires, corporateannual reports and statistical yearbooks, analyzing data by Factor Analysis, LogisticRegression Analysis and Linear Regression Analysis from SPSS software, andcalculating the Harbin City Wal-Mart Customer Equity with Excel software. The resultsshow that the model we propose has a strong operability.