Fortalecendo as ligações: valor do cliente no sistema móvel celular no Brasil

Abstract

The customer equity is a recent subject in the marketing field and have been arousing the attention of both the academic and the enterprising. It presents a possibility of guiding the enterprise strategies based on return on customer investment aids. To calculate the customer equity there are necessary revenue and acquisition, retention and add-on selling costs information, that will be projected to a lifetime customer with the firm. Hence, a discounted cash-flow is elaborated, obtaining the longtime customer value. This study aims to verify how the Brazilian mobile operators that adopt customer relationships strategies are using the customer equity concept to define these strategies. Because of thenewness of the subject, we opted for an exploratory study, that allowed us to comprehend the phenomenon and to describe the actual application stage of the customer equity concept on the researched enterprises. We adopted a qualitative approach, through four individual focus interviews with Brazilian mobile operator executives and secondary data collection. The results have shown that the customer equity determines the customer relationship strategies in the four operators. These enterprises calculate the customer equity, use the value to segment their client basis on profitable and non-profitable ones dividing them in levels, and, from then on, configure their offers, their relationship strategies and allocate their resources to both the actual client basis and the potentialclients. The difficulties on using the customer equity concept are the dynamic of the Brazilian market less mature then the European and the U.S. - , the lack of secure information and the costs allocation for every customer. All these difficulties are discussed by the customer equity theory, but the Brazilian market dynamics, with its competition structure modifications, is not observed by the academics.