Using downside CAPM theory to improve customer lifetime value prediction in non-contractual setting

Identifying and selecting the most profitable customers from a shareholder’s perspective is of great interest to marketing managers. One promising line in this regard is to explore the customer lifetime value and its profitable management over time. There is a significant body of marketing literature about CLV evaluation in terms of various perspectives. However, much less attention has been paid to the risk associated with customer relationships. Previous researches in this area considered risk as “variability of cash flows generated by customers”, regardless of the trend of variability. Whereas the upside and downside variability from the customer’s expected profitability are extremely different in CRM context. This paper provides a quantitative model based on downside Capital Asset Pricing Model (D-CAPM) to evaluate risk-adjusted CLV and compares the results by employment of traditional CAPM. This paper contributes to this field by extending the discussion on customer risk measurement and provides an approach that enables marketing managers to evaluate the risk of decline from average profitability for different customer segments.