A key challenge facing business marketers surrounds developing a deeper understanding of customer needs. We conceptualize that challenge as having three dimensions: calculating, creating and claiming value. We discuss key problems, new developments and research challenges in each of these three domains and note the desirability for a deeper collaboration between academics and practitioners to address the research challenges.

The purpose of this paper is to summarize key challenges and knowledge gaps in understanding the choices that both firms and customers make in a personalization/customization environment. We start with a summary of personalization and customization in practice, and then draw on research in economics, statistical, and consumer behavior to identify what we know and do not know. We conclude with a summary of key research opportunities.

The authors develop a framework that incorporates projected profitability of customer in the computation of lifetime duration. Furthermore, the authors identify factors under a manager's control that explain the variation in the profitable lifetime duration. They also compare other frameworks with the traditional methods such as the recency, frequency, and monetary value and illustrate the superiority of the proposed framework. Finally, the authors develop several key implications that can be of value to decision makers in managing customer relationships.

The authors decompose repeat buying for frequently purchased nondurables. There results are very similar for two categories each over a different city and time period. A factor analysis of 18 measures of repeat buying obtains four principal factors that explain 79-85% of the variance: Preference, Inertia, Coupon Proneness and Impulse Buying. A cluster analysis of factors on these dimensions yields four segments, with distinct behavioral characteristics.