Marketing: They Wrote The Book

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Marketing: They Wrote The Book

By John Foley
Issue date: Feb. 17, 1997

One-to-one marketing is the most old-fashioned of ideas--and the most up-to-the-minute.

That's the premise of Enterprise One To One (Doubleday, New York, 1997, $34.95), a new book by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers. They're the principals of Marketing 1:1 Inc., a Stamford, Conn., consultancy that specializes in customer relationship management and one-to-one marketing. The firm's clients include AT&T, NCR, Owens Corning, Pitney Bowes, a nd 3M.

Peppers and Rogers first laid out their ideas in The One-to-One Future, a book published in 1993. That future, they say today, is now. "We're at the end of the old-fashioned kind of aggregate market competition and at the very beginning of a new phase," Peppers says.

What's especially new, Peppers adds, is the way customer databases, interactive media, the World Wide Web, and other technologies help companies do business and retain their most valuable customers.

Peppers and Rogers' new book discusses two important concepts: a customer's lifetime value and vintage-the year that a customer started doing business with the company. With one-to-one marketing, they say, "the basis is share of customer, not just market share." That may sound obvious, but it isn't.

Their book provides many examples of companies moving in this direction. Ritz-Carlton knows which hotel guests like mints on their pillows. Levi Strauss sells made-to-fit jeans. Streamline, a Boston startup, tracks and delivers eve rything the average household needs.

But some of the ideas-such as custom-made "asymmetrical" bras and membership cards for Burger King restaurants-may seem farfetched. There are also some one-to-one flops, including an MCI marketing program called Customer First that failed because the sales organization was rewarded for gaining customers, but not for keeping them.

The book ends with a discussion of the substantial investment in IT that a company must make to do one-to-one marketing. While they acknowledge that the numbers can be intimidating at first, Peppers and Rodgers promise that the return on investment can be greater than 50% within just 18 months.

Like many other management books, Enterprise One To One was written for business executives seeking ways to energize their organizations. Though IT is central to the discussion, this is not a technology book. When Peppers and Rogers discuss "windows," for example, they're talking about business opportunities, not the PC operating system.

S till, for technology managers who want a concise introduction to one-to-one marketing, Enterprise One to One is a good place to start.

Return to: " Market Of One: Ready, Aim, Sell! "

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