Good discussion of customer retention in Fast Company this month. Another Peppers and Rogers piece on their favorite topic –Return on Customer –which is also the title of their latest book. The duo who popularized the concept of 1-to-1 marketing, dismiss the capital-is-the scarcest-resource mantra of the past, and say the scarcest resource is the customer. Isn’t that how Willy Loman would have put it? ‘Attention must be paid to this customer!’ But how?

Peppers and Rogers suggest treating different customers differently, because the technology is there to do it. They cite Tesco, the supermarket chain in the U.K. as sending out 4 million versions of a mailing (to 11 million households.)