Do stronger relationships with customers (customer-company relationships [CCR]) help firms better weather economic crises? To answer this question, we examine firm performance during the stock market crashes associated with the two most severe economic crises of the last 15 years—the protracted Great Recession crisis (2008–2009) and the shorter but extreme COVID-19 pandemic crisis (2020). Juxtaposing the predominant expected utility theory perspective with observed deviations in investor behavior during crises, we find that both pre-crash firm-level customer satisfaction and customer loyalty are positively associated with abnormal stock returns and lower idiosyncratic risk during a market crash, while pre-crash firm-level customer complaint rate negatively affects abnormal stock returns and increases idiosyncratic risk. On average, we find that one standard deviation higher CCR is associated with between $0.9 billion and $2.4 billion in market capitalization on an annualized basis. Importantly, we find that these effects are weaker for firms with higher market share during the COVID-19 crash, but not during the Great Recession crash. These results are found to be robust to a variety of alternate model specifications, time periods, sub-samples, accounting for firm strategies during the crises, and endogeneity corrections. When compared to relevant non-crash periods, we also find that such effects are equally strong during the Great Recession crash and even stronger during the COVID-19 pandemic crash. Contributing to both the marketing-finance interface literature and the nascent literature on marketing during economic crises, implications from these findings are provided for researchers, marketing theory, and managers.

加强与客户的关系（客户与公司关系[CCR]）是否有助于企业更好地应对经济危机？为了回答这个问题，我们研究了过去 15 年来两次最严重的经济危机（旷日持久的大衰退危机（2008-2009 年）和持续时间较短但极端的 COVID-19 大流行危机（2020 年））股市崩盘期间公司的表现。 ）。将主要的预期效用理论观点与危机期间观察到的投资者行为偏差进行比较，我们发现，崩溃前的公司层面的客户满意度和客户忠诚度与市场崩溃期间的异常股票回报和较低的特殊风险呈正相关，而崩溃前的公司层面的客户满意度和客户忠诚度与市场崩溃期间的异常股票回报和较低的特殊风险呈正相关。崩溃公司层面的客户投诉率会对异常股票收益产生负面影响，并增加特殊风险。平均而言，我们发现 CCR 高一个标准差与年化市值 9 亿至 24 亿美元相关。重要的是，我们发现，在 COVID-19 崩盘期间，对于市场份额较高的公司来说，这些影响较弱，但在大衰退崩盘期间则不然。研究发现，这些结果对于各种替代模型规范、时间段、子样本、危机期间的公司战略以及内生性校正的解释都是稳健的。与相关的非崩盘时期相比，我们还发现，这种影响在大衰退崩盘期间同样强烈，在 COVID-19 大流行崩盘期间甚至更强。这些研究结果为研究人员、营销理论和管理者提供了启示，为营销-金融界面文献和经济危机期间营销的新兴文献做出了贡献。