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Introduction
What constitutes customer value and its importance have had an appreciable level of attention in the management literature, albeit from different perspectives. In marketing, customer value has been termed the central model to competitive advantage and long-term success of business organizations (Salem Khalifa, 2004; Mishra et al., 2020; Zeithaml et al., 2020). For most marketing strategists and industrial-organization economists, customer value positively correlates with company success (Huber et al., 2001) and is widely recognized in most business strategy models (Cravens et al., 1997). For instance, superior customer value has been discussed as an indispensable tool for the success of value-based strategies (Woodruff, 1997) and the strategic weapon in attracting and holding customers (Wang et al., 2004). Hence, some scholars believe that one way to gain and stay competitive is through an excellent understanding of what customers currently value (Vargo and Lusch, 2004; Torkzadeh et al., 2020).
On the other hand, scholars such as Flint et al. (2011) believe that a more nuanced way of gaining unmatched competitive advantage, sustainable market leadership and better firm performance is by anticipating the value required by the customer (Kandampully and Duddy, 1999). The concept of customer value anticipation (CVA) responds to the challenges posed by the dynamism in customer preference and perception of value. Accordingly, CVA is seen as a critical window through which brands can better understand and meet customers' changing needs (see Flint et al., 2011; Chiu et al., 2014). Hence, studies on CVA have shown a positive correlation between satisfaction and loyalty, usually with satisfaction acting as a mediator for CVA and loyalty (see Zhang et al., 2016).
Despite the relevance of CVA in predicting satisfaction and loyalty, studies such as Flint et al. (2011) agree that the concept remains underexplored with the scholarly conversation on CVA predominantly assessed from the firm's perspective. According to Zhang et al. (2016), from the firm perspective, though the anticipation process also entails the prediction of product offering outcomes, the anticipation process is only effective when the customer is involved in the process. Also, the existing studies (see Flint et al., 2011; Kandampully and Duddy, 1999), for instance, have only looked at one of its outcomes (i.e. loyalty) as...