Unifying customer, product and brand performance management

Abstract

PurposeCustomer, product and brand (CPB) management constitute relevant and inextricably linked levels of decision-making that marketers should manage to drive business success. However, they are generally treated separately in extant research. It leads to a disconnected assessment and management of customers and products/brands, preventing marketers to take advantage of the positive implications of managing them simultaneously. This paper aims to propose a conceptual framework to unify these perspectives: the CPB bottom-up approach.Design/methodology/approachThe paper draws on a range of extant literature on customer equity, brand equity and product performance to identify how financial performance is assessed in each of these perspectives and support the conceptual proposition to unify these different levels of decisions-making.FindingsThe proposed framework allows predicting and managing the expected values of these three intertwined perspectives together, providing a unified forward-looking metric to more effectively drive marketing efforts.Research limitations/implicationsThe proposed framework opens the path for future discussion concerning possible models that can be adopted to implement it.Practical implicationsThe proposed framework allows managers to make decisions having a holistic assessment of CPB performance.Originality/valueIn practice, marketing managers have to deal with brand and product as well as customer levels of decision-making simultaneously. Besides this, adopting customer centricity does not decrease the importance of managing the performance of brands and products. Therefore, the proposition of a solution able to bridge the gap between these levels of decision-making enhances both the marketing practice and literature.