Happy Customers = Happy Stock Price?

We haven’t written much on this blog about customer satisfaction outside of this little rant about rancid chicken and, even more tangentially, this one about mood-tracking software. But here’s something worth looking into a bit more seriously. Claes Fornell, a b-school professor at Michigan and the man behind the American Customer Satisfaction Index, has co-written a new paper asserting that if you buy stock in companies with high customer satisfaction, you will gain high returns at low risk. Keep in mind that Fornell is, as stated, affiliated with the American Customer Satisfaction Index. Still, it’s an issue worth pondering and exploring. Here’s a link to a summary of the paper, which is being published in the Journal of Marketing; you can get the entire paper there as a paid download.