We started the research and planning for the first edition of this book in 2001. Our goal was to provide a handbook/textbook for students of the customer-centric movement to focus companies on customers and to build the value of an enterprise by building the value of the customer base. We have made many friends along the way and have had some interesting debates. We can only begin to scratch the surface in naming those who have touched the current revision of this book and helped to shape it into a tool we hope our readers will find useful.

We are honored to have contributed the royalties and proceeds from the sale of this book to Duke University, where Martha has served as an adjunct professor.

Thanks to Dr. Julie Edell Britton, who team-taught the Managing Customer Value course at Duke with Martha for many years, and to Rick Staelin, who has always supported the work toward this textbook and the development of this field. Additional thanks to all of the marketing faculty members at Duke, especially Christine Moorman, Wagner Kamakura, Carl Mela, and Dan Ariely, and all those who have used and promoted the book and its topics.

The voices of the many contributors who have shared their viewpoints have helped to make this book what it is; and you will see their names listed on the contents pages and throughout the text. We thank each of you for taking the time to participate in this project and to share your views and insights with students, professors, and other users of this book. And, as big as this book is, it is not big enough to include formally all the great thinking and contributions of the many academicians and practitioners who wrestle with deeper understanding of how to make companies more successful by serving customers better. We thank all of you, too, as well as all those at dozens of universities who have used the first or second edition of the book to teach courses, and all those who have used the book as a reference work to try to make the world a better marketplace. Please keep us posted on your work!

This work has been greatly strengthened by the critiques from some of the most knowledgeable minds in this field, who have taken the time to review the book and share their insights and suggestions with us. This is an enormous undertaking and a huge professional favor, and we owe great thanks to Becky Carroll, Jeff Gilleland, Mary Jo Bitner, James Ward, Ray Burke, Anthony Davidson, Susan Geib, Rashi Glazer, Jim Karrh, Neil Lichtman at NYU, Charlotte Mason, Janis McFaul, Ralph Oliva, Phil Pfeifer, Marian Moore, David Reibstein, and Jag Sheth. Thanks to John Deighton, Jon Anton, Devavrat Purohit, and Preyas Desai for additional contributions, and we also appreciate the support and input from Mary Gros and Corinna Gilbert. And thanks to Maureen Morrin and to Eric Greenberg at Rutgers, and to John Westman, executive vice president of Novellus, Inc., and adjunct professor of the Boston College Carroll School of Management.

Much of this work has been based on the experiences and learning we have gleaned from our clients and the audiences we have been privileged to encounter in our work with Peppers & Rogers Group. Dozens and dozens of the talented folks who have been PRGers over the past years have contributed to our thinking—many more than the ones whose citations appear within this book, and more than we are able to list here. Our clients, our consulting partners and consultants, and our analysts are the ones who demonstrate every day that building a customer-centric company is difficult but doable and worthwhile financially. Special thanks go to Hamit Hamutcu, Orkun Oguz, Caglar Gogus, Mounir Ariss, Ozan Bayulgen, Amine Jabali, and Onder Oguzhan for their thinking and support. We also thank Tulay Idil, Bengu Gun, and Aysegul Kuyumcu for research. And to Thomas Schmalzl, Annette Webb, Mila D’Antonio, Elizabeth Glagowski, and Mike Dandrea of the 1to1 Media team, our gratitude for a million things and for putting up with us generally. We also appreciate the work Tom Lacki has done toward this book and our thinking, as well as the work of Valerie Peck, Alan Pennington, and Deanna Lawrence. Special additional thanks for ideas in the original edition that have survived to this version to Elizabeth Stewart, Tom Shimko, Tom Niehaus, Abby Wheeler, Lisa Hayford- Goodmaster, Lisa Regelman, and many other Peppers & Rogers Group alumni as well as winners of the 1to1 Impact Awards and PRG/1to1 Customer Champions, who are best in class at customer value building.

Plain and simple, we could not have gotten this book done without the leadership and project management of Marji Chimes, the talented and intrepid leader for years of 1to1 Media and an integral part of the success of Peppers & Rogers Group, now a unit of Teletech, or the dedicated day-to-day help from Susan Tocco and Lisa Troland. And the real secret sauce to finishing the many details has been Amanda Rooker—a truly resourceful researcher and relentlessly encouraging and gifted content editor, who has patiently and capably assisted in winding us through the morass of secondary research and minutiae generated by a project of this scope.

Our editor at John Wiley & Sons, Sheck Cho, has been an enthusiastic supporter of and guide for the project since day one. As always, thanks to our literary agent, Rafe Sagalyn, for his insight and patience.

We thank the many professors and instructors who are teaching the first Customer Strategy or CRM course at their schools and who have shared their course syllabi. By so doing, they have helped us shape what we hope will be a useful book for them, their students, and all our readers who need a ready reference as we all continue the journey toward building stronger, more profitable, and more successful organizations by focusing on growing the value of every customer.