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The importance of effective planning and management of an organization’s array of customer and supplier relationships is self‐evident, yet relatively little research has been published which develops our academic or managerial understanding of the conceptual and practical problems inherent in this issue. This paper is written from an interaction and network perspective and critically reviews existing customer and supplier portfolio analysis and considers the implications of using such an approach for the management of relationships. The notion of relationship portfolios in the context of network theory is reviewed and the authors suggest that portfolios provide an alternative method of network conceptualization and analysis and that such portfolios may be a key factor in successful relationship management.

An important managerial task in business‐to‐business marketing is the strategic management of supplier‐customer relationships, which is concerned with a portfolio of relationships. A review of existing customer portfolio theories reveals that: most of the portfolio dimensions have not yet been empirically validated; the theoretical base of relevant dimensions may be conceptually inadequate in terms of strategy analysis; and the link between customer portfolio dimensions and customer performance has not yet been examined. Attempts to address these gaps in the literature by studying customer portfolios of large UK‐based banks. The main results indicate that the common industrial organization perspective may only give a short run picture of customer performance. Suggests that long run positioning value of a customer portfolio can be accounted for by resource‐based analysis and strategic approach to customer portfolio analysis. Concludes with a discussion of the results and implications.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss issues related to customer churn behavior in digital libraries (DLs) and demonstrate the successful application of Survival Analysis for understanding customer churn status and relationship duration distribution between customers and libraries.

The study applies non-parametric methods of Survival Analysis to analyze churn behaviors of 8,054 customers from a famous Chinese digital library, and a cluster method to make customer segmentation according to customer behavioral features.

The customer churn rate of the given library is very high, so as to the churn hazard in early three months after customer's registration on the web site of the library. There is clear difference in both customer survival time and churn hazard among customer groups. It is necessary to strengthen customer churn analysis and customer relationship management (CRM) for DLs.

The studied samples are mainly based on customers from one digital library and some hypotheses have not been strictly proven due to the absence of relevant empirical researches.

This study provides a reasonable basis for decision making about CRM in DLs.

Most previous researches about information behavior concentrate on information seeking behavior in DLs, seldom discuss customer switching behavior. The paper discusses issues related to customer churn analysis and illustrates the adaptation of Survival Analysis to understand customer churn status and relationship duration distribution in DLs.

This paper aims to analyze high-quality papers on the research of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) for product and service quality improvement from 2009 to 2022, in order to fully understand their historical progress, current situation and future development trend.

This paper adopts the bibliometrics method to analyze the relevant literature, including publishing trend and citation status, regional and discipline area distribution, and influential publications. Secondly, the VOSviewer is used for literature co-citation analysis and keyword co-occurrence analysis to obtain the basic literature and research hotspots in this research field.

Firstly, the study finds that the number of publications basically shows an increasing trend, and those publications are mainly published in tourism journals. In addition, among these papers, China has the largest number of publications, followed by the USA and South Korea. Through co-citation analysis of literature and keyword co-occurrence analysis, 22 foundational papers and six main research topics are obtained in this paper. Finally, this paper elaborates on the development trend of the research topic and future research directions in detail.

This is the first paper that uses bibliometrics to analyze and review relevant researches on eWOM for product and service quality improvement, which is helpful for researchers to quickly understand its development status and trend. This review also provides some future research directions and provides a reference for further research.

As Lindsay (1994, 1995) encourages validation of existing results, this research replicates Guilding and McManus (2002) in a New Zealand (NZ) context. The usage and perceived merit of customer accounting practices were lower in NZ than in the Australian study. Few of the regressions where customer accounting usage and perceived merit were dependent variables revealed a statistically significant role for competition intensity and market orientation. There was some minor support for the perceived merit of customer accounting being higher in companies experiencing medium levels of competition intensity.

Analyses customer satisfaction with mail‐order speciality foods in the UK and examines the relationship between satisfaction with eight attributes of mail‐order speciality food and their association with overall satisfaction and likelihood of future purchase. Univariate analysis reveals that a high proportion of mail‐order customers experience satisfaction with each of the eight mail‐order attributes, reflected in a high proportion of customers who are satisfied overall and who intend to repurchase the products in the future. Canonical correlation analysis reveals a statistically significant relationship between one set of variables, overall satisfaction and likelihood of future purchase, and another set of variables, the eight mail‐order attributes. Consequently the results indicate that customer satisfaction is associated with service aspects of mail‐order such as the order process and delivery service as well as physical product attributes such as product quality.

Internet service providers (ISPs) constitute a highly competitive market, while the unstable market conditions directly affect customer preferences and make ISPs to develop a “mass customization” strategy, individualizing services and approaching every customer in an individual way. However, customization requires an in‐depth analysis of current customer preferences and an evaluation of future behavior. The main objective of the paper is to present a framework for analyzing changes of customer preferences.

The paper presents detailed results of independent customer satisfaction surveys conducted in different time periods in the Greek ISP market. The analyses are based on non‐parametric statistical techniques and the multicriteria satisfaction analysis method, which is a multicriteria preference disaggregation approach.

Results are mainly focused on the evaluation of potential trends of e‐customer preferences. Furthermore, results of a benchmarking analysis are also presented, based on the evolution of satisfaction levels for the quality characteristics of the provided services.

Future research in the context of the presented study may be focused on satisfaction benchmarking analysis, given the rapid changes of the market conditions. An extended satisfaction survey will give the ability to analyze customer preferences in comparison with the main ISP competitors.

The presented study may help organizations in highly competitive markets dominated by rapid technological progresses to track short‐term changes of customer preferences.

The analyses presented are based on the combination of multicriteria analysis and non‐parametric statistics. The main advantage of these methods is that they respect the qualitative (ordinal) form of collected survey data.

An updated version of the original (1985) text, the book covers all aspects of marketing and selling bank services: the role of marketing; behaviour of customers; intelligence, planning and organisation; product decisions; promotion decisions; place decisions; price decisions; achieving sales. Application questions help to focus the readers' minds on key issues affecting practice.

To achieve a full understanding of the role of marketing from plan to profit requires a knowledge of the basic building blocks. This textbook introduces the key concepts in the art or science of marketing to practising managers. Understanding your customers and consumers, the 4 Ps (Product, Place, Price and Promotion) provides the basic tools for effective marketing. Deploying your resources and informing your managerial decision making is dealt with in Unit VII introducing marketing intelligence, competition, budgeting and organisational issues. The logical conclusion of this effort is achieving sales and the particular techniques involved are explored in the final section.

This paper aims to assess the usefulness of cost‐to‐serve for customer profitability management through literature review and a case study in a food‐industry company.

The research is based on a case study. The study presents the state‐of‐the‐art of the literature review related to cost‐to‐serve measurement and customer profitability analysis and a case study of a Brazilian food‐industry company with high operational complexity and an extensive customer product and commercial service line.

The literature review demonstrates that few empirical studies have actually addressed the problem of cost‐to‐serve measurement and customer profitability analysis. The findings of the study show that the measurement of cost‐to‐serve provides specific and detailed customer information that enables a more comprehensive customer profitability analysis than the classical paradigm.

A single case study does not allow the results to be generalized to other organizations.

The paper includes a comprehensive review of literature and the empirical case study in a Brazilian food company offers additional insights in cost‐to‐serve measurement and customer profitability analysis.