Professor Brian R. Chabowski, previous chair of marketing and international business in The University of Tulsa’s Collins College of Business, recently had a paper accepted for publication in the American Marketing Association’s (AMA) Summer Academic Conference Proceedings.
Each year, the AMA hosts one of the nation’s top academic marketing conferences. Chabowski’s paper is titled “Advancing an Integrative Framework for Customer Value Using Bibliometric Analysis” and was written with Jeeshan Mirza and Chatura Ranaweera.
At the heart of their research is customer value. The core issue of value for businesses and marketing is problem solving for the customer and/or consumer. But that value is in the eye of the beholder, the purchaser, and, Chabowski argues, is it up to marketers to realize that value and provide a gentle nudge to the customer toward what they want but cannot necessarily articulate.
Utilizing a method he developed, Chabowski and his colleagues surveyed the extant literature going back four decades to create a framework for summarizing their findings and providing a foundation for future research in customer value and its determination.
“The Model T is a great example of this,” Chabowski said. “Ten years before, customers could only envision wanting a faster horse. They did not have the experience to know what it was they really valued as consumers. It was up to the market to deliver them that value.”
An abstract of Chabowski and his colleagues’ research can be found in the proceedings of the AMA’s summer 2024 conference starting on page 568.