How do you take an individual who has never done business with your organization and gradually transform them into the best possible customer? How do you decide how much to spend on various marketing actions? How do you think about the pricing decision with a view to optimizing the value of your customers as assets? Where do you start, what tools do you use, and what heuristics are useful in making these decisions? This book attempts to answer questions such as these. The one-sentence summary of the answer, though, is simple - hold the individual's hands and walk them up a value ladder, one step at a time.

This book is written for an advanced student of business and the practicing manager. It presents an integrated view of the marketing function. In particular, it focuses on all the activities that a firm engages in to create and manage value - not just the customer-facing activities. It links the traditional views of customer value with the finance, accounting, human resources, organizational behaviour, information technology and operations functions of the organization. It draws on the science of behaviour change and the data sciences to present a contemporary view of the customer value function. The content is meant to be prescriptive - it describes a process for value creation and management, yet analytical; theoretical, yet empirically driven. It urges the reader to think about the customer value function to be organized along activities that the firm would like the customers to engage in, not activities that the firm engages in. It presents a framework that is not only conceptually driven but also has a sound mathematical basis.