This tract on customer-specific marketing in the retail industry--specifically grocery retailer--was written in 1999, at the apex or just past the apex of the one-to-one marketing movement. The author, Gary Hawkins, brings years of experience to the table from his tenure as CEO of a smallish grocery chain in New York who innovated with one of the first comprehensive customer loyalty cards. In the early parts of the book, fortunately, Hawkins does not rehash the arguments for and define frequent shopper cards but quickly gets to the necessary elements of setting up your frequent shopper program. This includes everything from IT to cards to change management. Since this is written as a handbook for a retailer, it will be somewhat dated today as these programs have become de rigeur for all but a few companies. The 'handbook' goes so far as to include frequently asked questions--it truly is a guidebook to setting this up.

The author backs up his personal approaches and successful programs by drawing on and making reference both to the best practices standard reporting templates of the day, most authored at least in part by Brian Woolf (the father of understanding grocery-customer-specific-marketing around loyalty cards) and the current vogue customer economics from books such as Customer Loyalty by Reichheld. Fortunately, this is more than principles: he lays out reporting templates, mentions the KPI's he thinks are best; however, most of the analytics are the standard meat and potatoes of the day: RFS analysis, migration reports, and the like. Hawkins does wow at the end in that he goes much further than anyone had, and lays out an advanced approach at the time, and one starting to be used today and picked up by some forward-looking very large chains. Hawkins calls this customer category management--where he starts matrixing customer segments with categories to understand the relative drive of specific consumers to success in the category. This is good stuff and still relevant today.

Overall, this was a logical extension to what was happening at the time and still has some relevant nuggets for today. However, we now have almost a decade of data on how loyalty cards can work and can't--and we've had some sobering dose of economic reality about how things got a little too crazy in terms of giveaways and spending on customers since the Bubble of the late 90's burst since this book has come out. ( )