Measuring the value of strategic resources. A literature overview of customers value

Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject Business economics - Accounting and Taxes, grade: 1,0, LMU Munich (Instituts für Rechnungswesen und Wirtschaftsprüfung), course: Accounting, Auditing and Analysis (AAA), language: English, abstract: This seminar paper gives an overview on the literature of measuring customer value. A lot of companies have a very low book to market value e.g. Apple (0.15), Microsoft (0.14), Amazon (0.04!) and Facebook (0.14) as of December 2017. Though according to US-GAAP and IFRS annual reports should provide investors and prospect investors with decision useful information the balance sheet lacks certain intangible assets that are obviously driving the value of the firm. That are for example brand equity, organizational capital and customer equity. Such assets became more important so that not only for researchers but also for practitioners and standard setters there is an incentive to identify possibilities to measure such assets reliably to make better investment decisions or, for the latter, to increase the decision usefulness of the information provided in the annual reports.

There is an increasing number of SBE (subscription based enterprises) or at least SB offerings which leads to an increasing number of balance sheets that do not sufficiently reflect the value of the firm. For a long time the value of customers was just a marketing issue and not in the focus of accounting researchers but due to the development described above it is getting into focus of accounting literature in the past decades (Gleaves, Burton, Kitshoff, Bates, & Whittington, 2008, pp. 827-832). There are several approaches to value customers, but they have in common that first the value of a single customer is derived the so called CLV (customer lifetime value), sometimes also referred to as CV (customer value). To value the customer base of a firm all CLVs are aggregate to derive the so-called CE (customer equity). The value a customer has for a firm is the sum of all discounted future contribution margins the firm can obtain from him (Berger & Nasr, 1998, pp. 18-19). Therefore, I first look at the eligibility of customer value as an asset. Afterwards I compare different approaches to derive the CLV then the approaches to derive the CE. Next, I analyze the literature concerning the link between performance and customer and show a possible calculation on the example of Netflix.