The One to One Future
Author: Martha Rogers, Don Peppers
List Price: $17.95
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ISBN: 0385485662
Publisher: Currency (14 December, 1996)
Sales Rank: 31,399
Average Customer Rating: 4.1 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 3 out of 5
Brilliant concepts; desperately needs an editor.
Peppers and Rogers may be the pioneers of one-to-one marketing techniques (or maybe even not), but they're terrible book writers. I've read their articles on the same topics, and they're much more concise. In the book, you learn all you really need to know in the first few paragraphs of each chapter; the rest is just regurgitation. I eventually gave up; I just couldn't read it anymore. You'd be better off reading a few articles, or someone else's books, unless you have an extremely high attention span or no background whatsoever in the concepts they discuss. They're very smart people, but if you've already learned the basics, this book will waste your time.
Rating: 5 out of 5
An excellent book for beginners and professionals
Having spent many years in sales and marketing, and now as an author (Windows 98 and MCSE Study Tips for Dummies) and trainer/documentation specialist, I can tell you that no one has a better handle on the customer relationship building subject than Don Peppers and Martha Rogers. Following this book through several reprints and revisions, it continues to get better and better. The subject matter is complex, yet they have encapsulated it in a way that makes it easy for anyone to read and comprehend. Kudos for an excellent job!
Rating: 3 out of 5
What is a "Relationship?"
Peppers and Rogers wrote a pioneering work on reaching customers, that taught marketers to look beyond "segments" to the individual people who actually bought their products or services. But they make an essential mistake in confusing the customer's familiarity with a particular business with having a relationship. Relationships exist between people who know one another, and a business relationship is one in which the customer deals with the same provider for each transaction. An example is a personal trainer you go to each time you work out, or a using the same accountant (not just the same accounting firm) for many years at tax time, or going to the same hairstylist, even following her when she moves to a new salon. These are real relationships, but phoning a catalog company and talking to a different person each time, even if that person can check your past orders and already has the billing information, is NOT a relationship. Using technology to make a transaction more efficient can be a service to customers. People do not always seek a relationship with their provider; sometimes they want anonymity, and the idea that the provider organization "knows" all about them can be scary. Only by distinguishing between real relationships and the kind of "pseudo-relationship" that Peppers and Rogers advocate can you sort out these issues.
To learn more about the concept of "relationship" versus the more common service encounter (between customer and provider who do not know each other and do not expect to interact again), read The Brave New Service Strategy by Dr. Barbara A. Gutek and Theresa Welsh. They postulate a service model that consists of a triangle of Customer, Organization and Provider (COP).
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