The CRM Cynic: Don and Martha ROC and Roll

The dynamic duo of one-to-one is back with another book.

Just as Don Peppers and Martha Rogers invented a philosophy, now they have come up with a metric to go with it: Return on Customer, or ROC.

And while it’s hardly a compelling acronym, it might be worth your while to read their book on it, titled: “Return on Customer (The Revolutionary New Way to Maximize the Value of Your Business).” We said might.

According to the one-to-one hustlers, “ROC equals a firm’s current-period cash flow from its customers plus any changes in the underlying customer equity, divided by the total customer equity at the beginning of the period.”

And they state that “reconciling the conflict between current profit and long-term value is one of the most serious difficulties facing business today.”

True. But what is ROC but a repackaging of lifetime value, ROI, and other tools that Lester Wunderman was using when Don and Martha were listening to the Osmonds?

That’s one problem with this book. Another is that once you get past the material on ROC, it’s all very familiar stuff. As we news hounds say, they have put a fresh lead on an old story.

For example, Don and Martha say that companies should empower their employees. It’s hardly a new point, and Reichheld has said it so much better.

And they walk us—one more time—through the one-to-one philosophy, which would be fine except that we’ve read it before.

It’s like the rich old aunt who refilled old Chanel No. 5 bottles with toilette water from Woolworth’s and gave them to poor relations on Christmas.

Finally, Don and Martha love repetition. They write that “customers are a company’s scarcest resource,” and two sentences later add: “Today, nothing is as scarce as customers.” Is there a rule that business books have to be badly written?

Now it’s time for full disclosure.

Primedia, the publisher of this newsletter, launched 1to1 magazine with Peppers and Rogers in 1999. We noticed then that there were two kinds of people in the world: Those who drank the one-to-one Kool Aid and those who didn’t.

I didn’t, and I can’t pretend to be objective. But if you’re desperate for input on CRM metrics, then buy this book and take it to the beach with you.

Want to comment on this review? Please e-mail us at [email protected]

“Return on Customer (The Revolutionary New Way to Maximize the Value of Your Business)” is a Currency Book published by Doubleday.