Return on Customer: A Revolutionary Way to Measure and Strengthen Your Business.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: BookSHELF - Brief Article - Book Review

Return on Customer: A Revolutionary Way to Measure and Strengthen Your Business. By Don Peppers and Martha Rogers. Currency/Doubleday, 296 pages. $24.95.

Return on customer (ROC) can be expressed as a mathematical equation, but to the authors, it's a measure of value creation--and a key metric to drive decisions about a host of business issues, including financial reporting and business combinations.

Authors Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, founders of an eponymous consulting group, have been expounding on the value of consumer focus for years. In the process, they've written a number of books, many with a "one to one" theme in the title. This book is perhaps a bit more technical, but a central message is tied back to a far more basic, and catchy, premise: "Without customers, you don't have a business. You have a hobby."

Peppers and Rogers don't minimize the difficulty of serving customers, which, they write, "are even scarcer than capital." The idea, they say, is to not...