Preface

Customers play a particularly important role in the company’s operations. They provide companies with cash incomes and other values. The values delivered by customers help companies to deepen their relationships with other market participants, such as shareholders, suppliers, or employees. As a result, customers start to be perceived as a company’s asset, the value of which can be measured and maximised. Hence, customer relationship-oriented actions become a condition for the company’s development, value increase, and improvement of income level. Changes in management theory and practice are accompanied by technological and social transformations. Application of modern technologies, including the Internet, gives a new dimension to relationships between customers and companies. In contrast to traditional mass media, the Internet became a space which offers the possibility of multi-sided communication, information search, transaction making, and even value co-creation. Consequently, the role of the Internet in building relationships between the company and customers becomes more and more pronounced, since it helps to acquire tangible benefits, such as decreasing costs or acquiring new customers. Merging of the two areas customer relationships and the Internet presents an important challenge for companies. Its main purpose is to elaborate stable and profitable customer relationships often on new markets, inaccessible in any other way. Companies willing to engage in such an activity have to display an innovative approach, adjusted to the challenge of building value based on a particularly valuable asset: the customers. In the monograph entitled Marketing Theory: Evolution and Evaluation, Sheth Gardner and Garrett (1988: 5) argue that marketing rests inexorably on two pillars: thorough understanding the consumer needs and behaviour; and critical analysis of opportunities for competitive advantage. The thematic area of this book will be centred mainly on the second pillar. The books seeks to answer the question how customer value to company (customer lifetime value) should be managed on the Internet, and more specifically, how to incorporate the Internet in the process of delivery of proposed value to customer in order to increase their lifetime value and thus increase the value of the company and generate value to the company’s shareholders and other stakeholders.