Home       About Us       Feuss in Prison       Publications       Speaking Engagements       Contact Us

This brief work published in Current Issues in Technology Management shows companies how to chart a course to increased market share using the three key tools of Customer Value Analysis: the Value Map, the Value Model, and the Competitive Comparison table. It provides an operationally definite treatment of the concept of Customer (Perceived) Value. It describes each of the key tools, and it outlines how to implement Customer Value Analysis using survey data.  



Dr. Feuss was the corresponding (i.e., lead) author on this seminal paper in the field that is now known as linkage research.   Written with Doctors Joel Harmon, Jeana Wirtenberg and Jeffrey Wides, this article describes models built for AT&T, the Veterans' Administration, PSEG, and Lucent Technologies, and it expands upon the theory of business that was proposed by the late Dr. W. Edwards Deming, who was unfortunately not listed in the citations.   This article was published in Cost Management, Volume 18, Number 1, January/February 2004.   Its copyright is held by Cost Management, and it is made available herein with permission.  



The factors that lead people to get married and those that enable them to stay married are overlapping, but not completely.   So are the factors that cause a customer to choose a brand, and those that cause a customer to stay with it.   This doctoral dissertation, which must be purchased from its publisher, shows that while brand image may dominate in the pre-purchase state, perceptions of overall quality and price determine whether a customer will stay with the brand selected.   From a psychometric perspective, the key finding in the dissertation was that brand image distorts post-purchase ratings of overall quality in the direction of expectations.   While the post-purchase effect of brand image was statistically significant, it was so small (in the business-to-business context) that, as a practical matter, it could be omitted from explanatory models with only a loss of statistical masochism.   This is a rather disturbing finding for those who worship at the altar of brand image.  



Most customer-satisfaction surveys provide information that is about as useful as half of a baseball score: The Yankees, 7.   With only this information, you don't know who is winning or losing.   Competition in business is more complex, inasmuch as it isn't limited to two teams.   The sample-the-market approach pierces through this complexity, and is described more fully in this early paper, which is an abstract of Dr. Feuss's presentation at Inc. Magazine's Advanced Customer Services Strategies Conference in 1997.   AT&T, his employer at the time, allowed this to pass into the public domain.