Drivers of customer equity in the South African IT hardware industry
Date
2013-10-04
Authors
King, Andrew John
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Abstract
Organisations increasingly require a firm understanding of what drives customers to do business with them and to continue doing business with them into the future. More importantly however is that organisations need to adopt an inward facing view or customer centric approach if they are to become or remain relevant in the hyper competitive consumer electronics market. As product differentiation becomes more difficult to achieve in mature markets organisations need to shift their focus from their self-stated drivers to the drivers and sub-drivers of importance as stated by their customers –customer equity drivers. Customer equity is a metric used by marketers to assign value to the intangible concept of their customers. This approach sums the lifetime values ofan organisation’s current and future customers in order to determine the value of the organisation. The purpose of the research is to evaluate the customer equity performance of South African Information Technology (IT) consumer notebook vendors. Specifically, thisresearch aims to determine thecustomer equity drivers and their relative importance and to evaluate theperformance of the South African IT vendors against these drivers. The existing approaches to customer equity were reviewed and the Driver modelwas selected as the appropriate model for evaluating the South African consumer notebook industry. A sample of 80 respondents who have purchased a consumer notebook within South Africa was used.Respondents completed an online questionnaire to collect data on the importanceand performance of IT vendorsrelative to customer equity. Statistical analysis wasconducted through CommonFactor Analysis. This resulted in a model that was interpreted to determine thedrivers of customer equity, their relative importance and the performance of IT vendors within South Africa. Recommendations were then made to vendors to improve theirperformance
Description
MBA thesis
Keywords
Customer equity, Information technology