The Impact of Marketing-Induced versus Word-of-Mouth Customer Acquisition on Customer Equity Growth

Companies can acquire customers through costly but fast-acting marketing investments or through slower but cheaper word-of-mouth processes. Their long-term success depends critically on the contribution of each acquired customer to overall customer equity. The authors propose and test an empirical model that captures these long-term effects. An application to a Web hosting company reveals that marketing-induced customers add more short-term value, but word-of-mouth customers add nearly twice as much long-term value to the firm. The authors illustrate their findings with some dynamic simulations of the long-term impact of different resource allocations for acquisition marketing.