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The One to One Future ****
- Building Business Relationships One Customer at a Time

Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, 1994, Piakus, London.

ISBN 0-7499-1398-3 (pbk?)
ISBN 0-7499-1492-0 (Pbk)

Well this book and the Mass Customisation book are the ones that started this SIM quest and has led to this web site.

Sub-titled: Building Business Relationships One Customer at a Time, this book sets out all the principles of One to One Marketing, one chapter at a time:
 

• Share of Customer, Not Share of Market
• Collaborate with Your Customers
• Differentiate Customers, Not Just Products
• Economies of Scope, Not Economies of Scale
• Manage Your Customers, Not Just Your Products
• Engage Your Customers in Dialogue
• Take Products to Customers, Not Customers to Products
• Make Money Protecting Privacy, Not Threatening It

First published in 1993, and based on research work from the 1990s, nowhere are there the real interactive mediums, like the Internet or Web-TV, mention. Here companies are achieving one to one through fax, pagers, letters. This serves to emphasise that one to one marketing is much more than technology, which is really just an enabler. It is rather a business strategy that needs a state of mind (i.e. culture) that must permeate a whole organisation.

It concludes with a somewhat frightening picture of a future where society reverts to one based on hunting and gathering, where we eat as well as we can forage.

One down side. Like a lot of American books it tends to be strong in its extortions and repetitive in writing, as though it is desperate to drive home the need to get up, go out, and do it!

Enterprise One to One ****
- Tools for Competing in the Interactive Age

Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, 1997,Bantam Doubleday Dell Pub. Group Inc. (Currency), New York.

ISBN 0-385-48205-1

Sub-titled: Tools for Completing in the Interactive Age, this recent book just oozes with technology, especially the Internet.Whilst, with its definition of the principles, there is some repetition from the earlier book, it does move forward in the setting out of various models, techniques and guidelines:
 

• Competition matrix of Needs Satisfied against Customer Reach
• Functions of the One to One Enterprise
• URL references to the Customer Valuation Spreadsheets
• Customer Value Tiering and Skews
• Customer Differentiation Matrix with its 4 quadrants and 2 axsis of Customer Valuations vs Customer Needs
• The Expanded Customer Need Set

The Customer Differentiation Matrix is used throughout the book to position the different case studies and to give suggestions as to how to move your enterprise from one quadrant to another, and towards a one to one relationship business model. The book critiques the various marketing techniques such as promotional incentives and cross selling, and introduces new techniques like mass customisation, customer database marketing, and learning relationships and communities. It is peppered with examples, not all of them success stories (chosen because they failed to follow the principles).

Towards the end, it maps out a simple 4 stage implementation and puts the case for action in the form of a letter to the CEO.

One to One Manager
- Real World Lesson in Customer Relationship Management

Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, 1999, Currency DoubleDay, New York

ISBN: 0385494084

The One to One Field Book
- The Complete Toolkit for Implementing a 1to1 Marketing Program

Don Peppers and Martha Rogers and Bob Dorf, 1999, Captone Publishing, Oxford, England or Bantam Doubleday, New York, ISBN 1 900961 87 3.

• You can download and read a summary (95K PDF file),
• Go to the Fieldbook web site
• See a quick overview.

The Experience Economy ****
- Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage

B Joseph Pine II & James H Gilmore, Harvard Business School Press, April 1999

• From the authors of the original book on Mass Customization, their latest book shows how Mass Customisation can create unique customer experiences. With even services become commodities, if industries such as Financial Services are to survive, they must look to delivering memorable experiences and ultimately customer transformation.
• Read an overview of the Experience Economy
• Read a chapter from the book.
• Read my own review

Unleashing the Ideavirus ***

Seth Godin, 2000, Do You Zoom, Inc.

ISBN: 0970309902

Seth Godin, the author of Permission Marketing, has taken the bold step to give away his latest book. The complete book (all 200 pages) is available for download from www.ideavirus.com (1MB ). Of course, being a consultant, Godin's real product is his consultancy services and the book becomes his marketing vehicle. Those who are reading the book are regularly encouraged to tell their friends and business acquaintances. The book is a follow-on to his successful book Permission Marketing, setting out to answer the question "how do marketers get permission in the first place?". The answer is to get other people to spread the word and then people will come to you. If a product or service or idea is really good then it will spread like wild-fire. However, the world is full of good ideas and communication channels abound. This book sets out to suggest ways you can make success more likely.

Section 1 covers Why Ideas Matter. Godin assets that wealth in the future is created by unleashing ideas. Farms and factories make little money and there are limits to their output but an idea can spread and spread and as they do so they become more powerful. Ideas are basically intellectual property: a song, a process, an invention. Hotmail and Polaroid cameras are Godin's favourites. Godin calls these ideas manifestos - a word I suspect was simply used to be different, to become associated with Godin. Because ideas (sorry, manifestos <g>) are intangible they need a medium to live in, and of course the internet is the medium of to-day. The internet also allows ideavirus to multiply quickly, for to-days ideas have the hallmarks of what yesterday we would have called fads. Never have product life cycles been so short, yet they no doubt will get even shorter! And in a winner-takes-almost-all world, speed of deployment (velocity) and ease of replication (smoothness) are critical. Godin, quite rightly asserts, that marketing need to learn new models: "Instead of always talking to consumers, they have to help consumers talk to each other."

For me, one of the hardest concepts to accept (not understand) in this chapter is the difference between word of mouth and ideavirus. With the former, people tell just a few friends and it soon sizzles out. With an ideavirus people tell a 100 friends and we get an exponential curve effect, then free publicity and even more people join in and spread the word, buy the product, visit the event etc.. Well, how many people and how often are they going take the risk of "spaming" their email list? Godin says that people have a thirst for new ideas, want to know about them, be part of them and eager to tell others. Such people he calls sneezers and non-sneezers appreciate being kept up-to-date by such people.

Section 2:  How To Unleash An Ideavirus provides the methodology. Different types of sneezers are analysed - in fact a whole industry exists of professional sneezers as well as communities of sneezers (e.g. news group leaders), how ideavirus can have persistence, their life-cycle, how their message can be amplified, what makes an ideavirus valuable and worth spreading - including rewarding sneezers.

Section 3: The Ideavirus Formula introduces a mathematical formula that identifies 8 elements that combine to make an ideavirus be successful or not, e.g. how many other people each person will pass the message onto. By understanding these elements it may even be possible to manipulate them.

Section 4: Case Studies and Riffs has examples of both good and ought to be good ideavirus if only they had read his book! A successful ideavirus is Vindigo, a directory of restaurants, entertainment venues and stores in major U.S. cities that Palm users can download. A non ideavirus is the Toyota Prius, a hybrid gasoline and electricity vehicle. In shades of Funky Business, Godin suggests new ideas are better propagated if they are manifestly different - i.e. the car should look distinctly different so that owners can be seen to make a statement.

Godin admits that one of his big challenges with Permission Marketing and now with Unleashing the Ideavirus is that a lot of stuff in his books seems pretty obvious. He argues that existing methods of mass marketing are so ingrain, yet now so inappropriate, that he needs to write down the new model in the hope that people see the need for change and embrace the new way.

Whilst Godin may be giving the book away. the true cost of this book is your time to read it. Like all American books <g> it constantly repeats itself. First the idea is introduced, then explained in more detail (repeating the first bit), then again but in more detail and finally in section 4 in more detail again, but with a good dose of repetition. This book needs some stamina to get through!

Despite being over 200 pages, the on-line book is split into just 4 sections rather than numerous chapters and there is no index, though the content pages are comprehensive.
 

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New Marketing Paradigm
- Integrated Marketing Communications

Don E. Schultz, Stanley I. Tannenbaum and Robert F. Lauterborn, 1994, NTC Business Books

ISBN: 0-8442-3452-4