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Abstract: The current trends in business processes call for companies to operate in a highly competitive environment. Part of the changes observed is the increased focus on customer retention. The management of customer relations and the retention and expansion of the customer base are among the main tasks of any business. The concept of customer equity management provides opportunities for fulfilment of these tasks, but also monitors the financial well-being of the company. All this necessitates its implementation by businesses. The ability to preserve and manage the company's customer base is the application of the customer equity concept. This paper presents the opportunities for managing and increasing the value of customer equity through customer engagement. The research carried out tries to unify the conceptual framework of customer equity with the process of customer engagement resulting in the development of an integrated conceptual framework. Based on the proposed conceptual framework, the author draws the attention of managers not only to the analyses of the profitability from customers, but also to engagement of the entire customer base, regardless of its financial contribution to the well-being of the company. As a result, the intangible benefits from customers are regarded as an opportunity to increase the company's customer equity.
Keywords: Customer Equity, Customer Engagement, CLV, Customer Equity Managemen, Brand
1.Introduction
The current trends in the development of the economy lead to substantial changes in the marketing approaches adopted by businesses. Recent decades have seen a shift from product to consumer-focused marketing. Already in 1996 the community was presented with the concept of customer equity, which has been established as the leading philosophy of marketers. At its core "customer equity" is seen as the total of the discounted lifetime values of the company's customers. This definition has different aspects, and depending on the scope of customers the authors may be placed inti two groups. The first one (Blattberg, Deighton (1996), Hanssens, Rust, Srivastava (2009)) define customer equity as the sum of discounted lifetime values of the existing customers of the company; the second group (Rust, Lemon (2004), Gupta, Zeithaml (2006), Leone (2006), Vogel, Evanschitzky, Ramaseshan (2008), Blattberg, Getz, Thomas (2001)) believe that customer equity should include the future customers of the company. As a concept, customer equity management studies...