Customer Value : What Do We Know, How Do We Know, and How Might We Know About It ? Bibliometric Study of the Customer Value Literature

The paper objective is to present the descriptive bibliometric study of the Customer Value academic discourse within the Management Sciences. As the literature shows it, academic research on the concept of the VC grows quickly; and yet, a single global approach is still missing, giving place to a multi-paradigmatic vision, with a frequently existing confusion among several divergent paradigms and the various approaches. In order to verify and illustrate such a dispersion of the conceptions of Customer Value, a quantitative and qualitative bibliometric study has been realised. The representative sample of 384 scholarly journals article records on “Customer Value” or “Consumer Value” (BSP database, 1900-2006) is analysed quantitatively (descriptive statistics) and qualitatively (Titles and keywords semantic contents analysis), providing a global picture of the research trends on Customer Value within the Management Sciences