The Empirical Research On The Influence Of Marketing Investment To Customer Equity

With the increasingly well-development of commodity economy, the market ismore competitive, which gradually make the customer-centering to replace theproduct-centering and become the core theory of business management, while thecustomer equity is also incorporated into the enterprise resource as an importantindicator of evaluating the enterprises competitiveness. But now many seniormanagement are faced with a contradictory dilemma: in order to earn higher profits,they invested huge funds to improve the quality of products and services, increasedthe efforts of advertising and promotion, etc., but don’t know that the extent of thesemarketing investment can affect customer behavior and whether can produce areasonable return, and also don’t know how to distribute the marketing investment tomaximize the customer equity, resulting in the waste of marketing resources.At present, the researches on the influence of marketing investment to customerequity are mostly the distribution research of marketing investment between customeracquisition and customer retention, and rather lack of the empirical researches. Thevalue of customer equity includes both monetary value and non-monetary value, andthey are both important, but research on non-monetary value of customer equity isobviously insufficient. Therefore, it is an important issue of determining therelationship on the influence of marketing investment to customer equity, anddemonstrating the contribution of these investments to different value composition ofcustomer equity, in order to optimize the allocation of marketing resources, it also hasgreat theoretical value and practical significance.This paper will study the influence of marketing investment to the different valuecomposition of customer equity from the angle of marketing investment on the basisof reading a lot of relevant literatures. This paper proposed the conceptual model andcorresponding hypothesis by analyzing their relationship. There are seven types ofmarketing investment that enterprises often involves in reality, which are as follows:investment in perceived quality, perceived price, advertising, personal selling, salespromotion, relationship marketing and distribution channels. The customer equity arebroke down into four components of basic-purchase value, cross-buying value,word-of-mouth value and knowledge value. Finally, this paper selects Xi’anMetersbonwe company as research object, and collects data by the way ofquestionnaire survey, then tests the conceptual model and research hypothesis by SPSS17.0and structural equation modeling software AMOS7.0. Through theempirical analysis, the results show that different types of marketing investmentwould have different degrees of impact to different value composition of customerequity, so the enterprises will make their business plans according to their ownstrategic objectives, and allocate marketing resources scientifically and rationally.