Customer Relationship Management: Getting It Right!

17.4. Segmenting Customers

Don Peppers and Martha Rogers introduced the concept of marketing to each customer one at a time in The One to One Future (1993). Their book paints an exciting vision—a future in which information about our customers allows us to interact with each customer individually, just as if we were standing behind the counter of the corner grocery store and able to deliver a friendly greeting to each customer as he or she walked through the door. In the “old” days, storeowners knew their best and most loyal customers by name, and they often saved them the special cuts of beef or personally delivered the grocery order to their homes because they had been such valuable customers over the years. This is a wonderful picture that ...