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 Managing Customer
Experience and Relationships
Managing Customer
Experience and
Relationships
A Strategic Framework

FOURTH EDITION

Don Peppers
Martha Rogers
Copyright © 2022 by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

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Contents

Foreword by Philip Kotler ix

Preface xiii
Acknowledgments xvii
About the Authors xix

PART I Technology’s Rainbow 1

CHAPTER 1 Evolution of Marketing and the Revolution

of Customer Strategy 3
Roots of Customer Relationships and Experience 6
Initial Assessment: Where Is a Firm on the Customer
Strategy Map? 14
Comparing Market-Share and Share-of-Customer Strategies 16
What Is a Relationship? Is That Different from Customer
Experience? 20
Learning Relationships: The Crux of Building Customer
Value 22

CHAPTER 2 Treat Different Customers Differently:

How Learning Relationships Lead
to Better Experiences and Higher Profit 25
Focus on Relationship Equity 25
The Strategy: Treat Different Customers Differently (TDCD) 26
The Technology Revolution and the Customer Revolution 28
What Characterizes a Relationship? 31
Customer Loyalty: Is It Emotional? Or Behavioral? 34
Customer Retention and Enterprise Profitability 37

CHAPTER 3 Better Customer Experiences for Better

Shareholder Return 49
Frictionless: The Ideal Customer Experience May
Be No Experience at All 49
Product Competence 56

v
vi Contents

Customer Experience Duality 58

Customer Competence 59
Understanding Customer Experience through
Customer Journey Mapping 62

CHAPTER 4 IDIC and Trustability: Building Blocks

of Customer Relationships 69
IDIC: Four Implementation Tasks for Creating and Managing
Customer Experiences and Relationships 69
How Does Trust Characterize a Learning Relationship? 78
Do Things Right, Do the Right Thing, and Be Proactive 85
Relationships Require Information, but Information
Comes Only with Trust 91
Behind Their Customers’ Backs 94
How Trustable Companies Operate 96
Recovering Lost Trust 97
PART I: FOOD FOR THOUGHT 101

PART II Customer Experience and Relationships:

Trust Is the Foundation and IDIC the Building Blocks 105

CHAPTER 5 IDIC Step 1: Identify Individual Customers 107

Individual Information Requires Customer Recognition 108
The Real Objective of Loyalty Programs 113
What Does Identify Mean? 118
Four Ways to Integrate the Online and Contact-Center
Experience 119
Customer Data Revolution 122
Cookies and Privacy 125

CHAPTER 6 IDIC Step 2: Differentiate Customers by Value 131

Customer Value Is a Future-­Oriented Variable 133
Customer Lifetime Value 135
Recognizing the Hidden Potential Value in Customers 141
Different Customers Have Different Values 146
Customer Value Categories 149
Customer Referral Value 152

CHAPTER 7 IDIC Step 2: Differentiate Customers

by Needs 167
Differentiating Customers by Need: Definitions
and Examples 168
Understanding Customer Behaviors and Needs 178
Why Doesn’t Every Company Already Differentiate Its
Customers by Needs? 181
 Contents vii

Categorizing Customers by Their Needs 183

Community Knowledge 188
Using Needs Differentiation to Build Customer Value 192

CHAPTER 8 IDIC Step 3: Interact to Learn and Collaborate 197

Dialogue Requirements 199
Implicit and Explicit Bargains 200
Do Consumers Really Want One-­to-­One Marketing? 202
Customer Dialogue: A Unique and Valuable Asset 208
Efficient and Effective Customer Interaction 213
Complaining Customers: Hidden Assets? 215
Empowering Customers to Defend the Brand 223
Age of Transparency 228

CHAPTER 9 IDIC Step 3: Interact/Privacy Considerations 239

Protect Privacy and Earn Customer Trust to Encourage
Interaction 242
General Data Protection Regulation 244
Customer Loyalty: Is A Customer Loyal to a Company,
or a Company Loyal to a Customer? 250
Privacy Pledges Build Enterprise Trust 255
The Web That Might Have Been 256

CHAPTER 10 IDIC Step 4: Customize to Build Learning

Relationships 263
How Mass Customization Works 264
How Can Customization Be Profitable? Answer:
Configuration 268
Technology Accelerates Mass Customization 275
Customization of Standardized Products and Services 279
Value Streams 284
Customer Success Management 286
Culture Rules 291
Technology’s Real Rainbow: Collaborative Learning
Relationships 291
PART II: FOOD FOR THOUGHT 293

PART III Making It Happen 301

CHAPTER 11 Measuring and Managing to Build Customer Value 303

Customer Equity 312
Customer Loyalty and Customer Equity 325
Return on Customer 329
Leading Indicators of LTV Change 343
Stats and the Single Customer 347
viii Contents

CHAPTER 12 Customer Analytics, Martech, Critical

Thinking, Data Science, and
the Customer-­Strategy Enterprise 351
Customer-­Specific Data and Longitudinal Insight 353
Big Data 358
Likelihoods, Probabilities, and Reality 366
A/B Testing: Some Guidelines for Non-Statisticians 371
Conditional Reasoning and Bayesian Analysis 374
A Small Section on a Big Topic: Using Martech to Build
Customer Value and for Marketing Tasks 383
An Analytical Fable 385

CHAPTER 13 Organizing and Managing the Profitable

Customer-­Strategy Enterprise 387
Who Owns the Customer Relationship? 387
What Is the Financial Case for Investing
in Customer Experience? 390
Relationship Governance 399
Making It Happen 405
How Does Relationship Governance Affect Customer
Service Management? 414

CHAPTER 14 Leading to Build Customer Value 415

How Marketers Work with the Finance Department 416
Human Resources: Managing Employees
in the Customer-­Strategy Enterprise 417
Keeping and Growing Customers is Aligned with
Keeping and Growing Employees 429
Leadership Behavior of Customer Relationship
Managers and Others Leading the Customer-­Centric
Organization 435
Futureproofing the Customer-­Centric Organization 439
PART III: FOOD FOR THOUGHT 441

Glossary 445

Name Index 461

Term Index 469

Foreword
The View from Here
It’s been five decades since I first started studying and writing about marketing. Back
then, the Industrial Age was in its prime. Manufacturers churned out products on
massive assembly lines and stored them in huge warehouses, where they patiently
waited for retailers to order and shelve boxes and bottles so that customers could buy
them. Market leaders enjoyed great market shares from their carefully crafted mass-­
production, mass-­distribution, and mass-­advertising campaigns.
What we all learned from the Industrial Age is that if an enterprise wanted to
make money, it needed to be efficient at large-­scale manufacturing and distribution.
The enterprise needed to manufacture millions of standard products and distribute
them in the same way to all of their customers. Mass producers relied on numerous
intermediaries to finance, distribute, stock, and sell the goods to ever-­expanding
geographical markets. However, in the process, producers grew increasingly removed
from any direct contact with end users.
Producers tried to make up for what they didn’t know about end users by using a
barrage of marketing research methods, primarily customer panels, focus groups, and
large-­scale customer surveys. The aim was not to learn about individual customers but
about large customer segments, such as “women ages 30 to 55.” The exception occurred in
business-­to-­business marketing, where each salesperson knew each customer and prospect
as an individual. Well-­trained salespeople were cognizant of each customer’s buying
habits, preferences, and peculiarities. Even here, however, much of this information was
never codified. When a salesperson retired or quit, the company lost a great deal of specific
customer information. Only more recently, with sales automation software and loyalty-­
building programs, have business-­to-­business enterprises begun capturing detailed
information about each customer on the company’s mainframe computer.
As for the consumer market, interest in knowing consumers as individuals lagged
behind the business-­to-­business marketplace. The exception occurred with direct
mailers and catalog marketers who collected and analyzed data on individual cus-
tomers. Direct marketers purchased mailing lists and kept records of their transactions
with individual customers. The individual customer’s stream of transactions provided
clues as to other items that might interest that customer. For example, in the case of
consumer appliances, the company could at least know when a customer might be
ready to replace an older appliance with a new one if the price was right.
As the twentieth century progressed, direct marketers became increasingly sophis-
ticated. They supplemented mail contact with the adroit use of the telephone and tele-
marketing. The growing use of credit cards, and customers’ willingness to give their
credit card numbers to merchants, greatly stimulated direct marketing. The emergence

ix
x Foreword

of fax machines further facilitated the exchange of information and the placing of
orders. The Internet and email facilitated direct marketing. Customers could view
products visually and order them easily over the phone or online, receive confirma-
tion, and know when the goods would arrive.
As the 21st century drove interactivity between customers and companies, and
among each other, even companies that don’t really understand social networking
realize they have to get on board. If 33 million people are in a room, you have to visit
that room.1
But whether a company was ready for customer relationship management depended
on more than conducting numerous transactions with individual customers.
Companies needed to build comprehensive customer databases. Companies had been
maintaining product databases, sales force databases, and dealer databases. Now they
needed to build, maintain, mine, and manage a customer database that could be used
by company personnel in sales, marketing, credit, accounting, and other company
functions.
As customer database marketing grew, several different names came to describe it,
including individualized marketing, customer intimacy, technology-­enabled marketing,
dialogue marketing, interactive marketing, permission marketing, and one-­to-­one
marketing.
Modern technology makes it possible for enterprises to learn more about individual
customers, remember those needs, and shape the company’s offerings, services, mes-
sages, and interactions to each valued customer. The new technologies make mass
customization (otherwise an oxymoron) possible.
At the same time, technology is only a partial factor in helping companies do
g­ enuine one-­to-­one marketing. The following quote about customer relationship
management (CRM) makes this point vividly:

CRM is not a software package. It’s not a database. It’s not a call center or a
Web site. It’s not a loyalty program, a customer service program, a customer
acquisition program, or a win-­back program. CRM is an entire philosophy.
—­Steve Silver

Whereas in the Industrial Age, companies focused on winning market share and
new customers, more of today’s companies are focusing on share of customer, namely,
increasing their business with each existing customer. These companies are focusing
on customer retention, customer loyalty, and customer satisfaction as the important
marketing tasks, and customer experience management and increasing customer
value as key management objectives.

1
Juliette Powell, 33 Million People in the Room (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Financial Times Press,
2009), pp. 8–9.
 Foreword xi

Various kindred customer-­focused efforts are more than just an outgrowth of

direct marketing and the advent of new technology. As the Interactive Age progresses,
mass marketing must give way to new principles for targeting, attracting, winning,
serving, and satisfying markets. As advertising costs have risen and mass media has
lost some effectiveness, mass marketing is now more costly and more wasteful.
Companies are better prepared to identify meaningful segments and niches and
address the individual customers within the targeted groups. They are becoming
aware, however, that many customers are uncomfortable about their loss of privacy
and the increase in solicitations by mail, phone, and email. Ultimately, companies will
have to move from an “invasive” approach to prospects and customers to a “permis-
sions” approach. On the flip side, customers—­now in contact with millions of other
customers—­have never been more informed or empowered.
Despite being introduced in enterprises large and small over two decades ago, the
full potential of CRM is only beginning to be realized. Of course, every company must
offer great products and services. But now, rather than pursue all types of customers at
great expense only to lose many of them, the objective is to focus only on those
particular customers with current and long-­term potential in order to preserve and
increase their value to the company.
In this fourth edition of their widely used textbook, Peppers and Rogers offer a
careful context as well as modern thinking on how to grow the value of a company by
growing the value of the customer base, how to increase profits by using modern tech-
nology and behaving ethically, and how to look ahead to what will be coming next.

Philip Kotler
S. C. Johnson Distinguished Professor of International Marketing,
Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University (Emeritus)

Philip Kotler is widely known as the father of modern marketing. His textbook
Marketing Management, coauthored with Kevin Keller, has become the foundational text
for marketing courses around the globe. First published in 1976 by Prentice Hall, it is now
in its 16th edition. In addition to his many books and university honors, Dr. Kotler has
established the annual international World Marketing Summit, now in electronic format
to reach audiences worldwide.
Preface

The One to One Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time was our very
first book, and we sent it to the publisher in February 1993 (“paper manuscript only,
please; no electronic files allowed”). During the three previous years it took us to write
the book, we often referred to it as a work of “business science fiction,” in which we
were trying to imagine how businesses would compete once interactive technologies
became ubiquitously available. And while we thought the future we were describing
was technologically inevitable, we also judged that it was still 10 or 20 years away and
would most likely arrive when fiber-­optic cables were finally connected to individual
homes and offices.
On p. 5 of our book, we said that in the 1:1 future:

products will be increasingly tailored to individual tastes, electronic media

will be inexpensively addressed to individual consumers, and many prod-
ucts ordered over the phone will be delivered to the home in eight hours or
less. In the 1:1 future businesses will focus less on short‑term profits derived
from quarterly or annual transaction volumes, and more on the kind of
profits that can be realized from long‑term customer retention and life-
time values.

We went on to describe some of the social implications of truly ubiquitous, always-

­on interactivity, suggesting that our vision of the 1:1 future:

holds immense implications for individual privacy, social cohesiveness,

and the alienation and fractionalization that could come from the break-
down of mass media. It will change forever how we seek our information,
education, and entertainment, and how we pursue our happiness. In addi-
tion to the “haves” and “have nots,” new class distinctions will be created
between the “theres” and “there nots.” Some people will have jobs that
require them to be there—­somewhere—­while others will be able to work
mostly from their homes, without having to be anywhere.

However, while we thought this future was still a decade or two away, the year
after our book was published Netscape released its Navigator web browser, the first
commercial product that truly allowed businesses to participate in a completely new
interactive medium, the World Wide Web. And commercial interest in the World Wide
Web grew explosively. There were just 130 websites at the end of 1993, most operated by

xiii
xiv Preface

academic or government entities, but by 1997 there were more than a million, and by
2001 there were nearly 30 million, almost all of which belonged to businesses.1
These businesses all needed advice, help, answers, and suggestions. They wanted
to know what the best policies would be for succeeding in a world where their cus-
tomers were now just a click away from the competition. Our book took off as web-
masters working for companies around the world sought out new strategies and best
practices for interacting with their customers one at a time, now that they could. The
management guru Tom Peters called The One to One Future the “book of the year” in
1993, and in 1994 BusinessWeek called it the “bible of the new marketing.” In 1995 Inc.
magazine put us on its cover, and George Gendron, the magazine’s chief editor, said
“Peters was wrong. This is not the book of the year. It’s not even the book of the decade.
It’s one of the two or three most important business books ever written.”2
So we kept thinking about all this, and we wrote more books, and we began con-
ducting workshops and giving presentations to businesses, associations, and confer-
ences around the world. We formed a consulting company, Peppers & Rogers Group,
all the better to help companies come to grips with the powers and limitations of this
new type of marketing. Over the years we have consulted for, spoken with, and advised
literally hundreds of companies in more than 60 countries around the world, from
Algeria, Argentina, and Bulgaria, to Turkey, the United Kingdom, and Vietnam. We
know what works and what doesn’t, and we also know what works in some cultures
but not so much in others. Moreover, when someone—­anyone—­comes up with a
promising new idea in this discipline, we rapidly hear about it. And then we speak
about this new idea, and we write about it.
We created the IDIC framework (identify-­differentiate-­interact-­customize) in the
mid-­1990s as a part of our consulting methodology. We tested it and refined it during
our consulting work for many different companies before it first appeared in print in
our 1999 book The One to One Fieldbook: The Complete Toolkit for Implementing a
1to1 Marketing Program, which we wrote with the leader of Peppers & Rogers Group’s
consulting practice, Bob Dorf. The Fieldbook included checklists, questionnaires, exer-
cises, and self-­help tools to guide businesses looking to gain more of the advantages
offered by the internet, mobile phones, customer databases, and mass-­customization
technologies. By 2004 this IDIC framework had clearly shown its merits, so we used it
as an organizing principle for the first edition of this textbook, and it remains a highly
useful organizing principle today.
As we write these words, companies all over the world are hard at work on their
digital transformations, customer initiatives, and customer experience programs in an
effort that was largely underway, but has been greatly accelerated by the COVID-­19
crisis, and is likely to remain highly active even after the virus is finally gone. McKinsey
estimated that e-­commerce penetration levels alone increased so dramatically that in

1
Internet Live Stats, “Total Number of Websites,” https://www.internetlivestats.com/total-­number-­
of-­websites/, accessed September 23, 2021.
2
Amazon.com book description, The One to One Future, available at https://www.amazon.com/One-­
Future-­Don-­Peppers/dp/0385485662, accessed September 23, 2021.
 Preface xv

just the first three months of the COVID-­19 crisis (2Q, 2020), the United States fully
realized ten years’ worth of e-­commerce growth,3 virtually at all once. Online penetra-
tion in the U.S. consumer economy has increased by 35%, on average, from the onset
of COVID-­19 through July 2021,4 and figures from around the world show similar
jumps. Whether you are contemplating a career in marketing, or your own company is
hustling to get its digital act together, or you’re simply trying to survive in a digital
world where every quarter seems to produce a newly disruptive technology, we hope
that the lessons in this revised and updated edition will be invaluable.
We have dramatically increased the emphasis on the financial issues that often con-
found marketers as they try to justify the business value of a better customer experience
that may cost money in the short term. We’ve also radically reshaped the sections on
customer analytics, to empower marketers with the knowledge they need to have intel-
ligent conversations with the quantitative analysts, and to make objective, data-­driven
decisions without having to write an equation or calculate a standard deviation.

How to Use This Book

Each chapter begins with an overview and includes these elements:

• Glossary terms are printed in boldface the first time they appear in a chapter,
and their definitions are located in the full glossary at the end of the book,
and all of the glossary terms are included in the index for a broader reference
of usage in the book.
• Sidebars provide supplemental discussions and real-­world examples of
chapter concepts and ideas.
• Food for Thought discussion questions for each chapter appear at the end of
Part 1, Part II, and Part III of the book.

We anticipate that this book will be used in one of two ways: Some readers will
start at the beginning and read it through to the end. Others will keep it on hand and
use it as a reference book. For both groups of readers, we have tried to make sure the
index is useful for searching by names of people and companies as well as terms,
acronyms, and concepts.
If you have suggestions about how readers can use this book, please share those
at peppersrogers1@gmail.com.

3
Amit Mathradas, “Covid-­19 Accelerated E-­Commerce Adoption: What Does It Mean for the
Future?” Forbes, December 29, 2020, at https://www.Forbes.Com/Sites/Forbesbusinesscouncil/
2021/12/29/Covid-­1 9-­A ccelerated-­E - ­C ommerce -­A doption-­W hat-­D oes-­I t-­M ean-­F or-­
The-­Future/?Sh=2b6c021a449d, accessed September 23, 2021.
4
“US Consumer Sentiment and Behaviors during the Coronavirus Crisis,” McKinsey & Company,
August 19, 2021, at https://www.mckinsey.com/business-­functions/marketing-­and-­sales/our-­insights/
survey-­us-­consumer-­sentiment-­during-­the-­coronavirus-­crisis, accessed September 23, 2021.
xvi Preface

One more thing: In The One to One Future we did make one big prediction that has
not come true, at least not yet anyway. Back then, we made this prediction in Chapter 9,
which we titled “Make Money Protecting Privacy, Not Threatening It.” If anything,
recent experience has shown that there are a number of giant, even monopolistic busi-
nesses today that show no intention whatsoever to protect their users’ privacy. Indeed,
some businesses have become very profitable, even though they were built on the
premise that the private, personal data of their users is a commodity to be bought and
sold to the highest bidder (quite literally). And we say users in this case because the
consumers who use platforms like Facebook, Google, or even LinkedIn are not actual
customers at all. Many such social media platforms’ customers are the advertisers and
other businesses that pay to gain access to users’ personal data—­data about the prod-
ucts or services a user has looked at, or even about the messages a user has exchanged
with friends. As the saying goes, if you think an online product is free, that means
you’re not really the customer—­you’re the product.
So in this fourth edition we have also added extensively to our discussion of pri-
vacy protection—­what it means, how it can happen, how it might occur in the future,
what regulations are beginning to enforce it, and so forth. But don’t get us wrong. We
still think that the ultimate future will be one in which the most successful companies
will be trustable—­proactively trustworthy. They will want to act in their customers’
own interest, because in the long run this will create the most value from each cus-
tomer. We believe that the moral arc of progress continues to point upward—­that, over
time, more and more enterprises will find it in their own best interest, not just ethically
but financially, to embrace a more socially beneficial purpose and to act in their cus-
tomers’ interest. Moreover, we predict that as more businesses embrace trustability,
consumers will show less and less tolerance for privacy-­abusing companies, even those
that offer their services absolutely free to their users.
In the future, we believe, business executives will strive to treat every customer the
way they’d like to be treated themselves, if they were the customer. And we very much
hope that you will be one of these future business executives. Enjoy our textbook and
let us know what you think at peppersrogers1@gmail.com.

Don Peppers and Martha Rogers Ph.D.

January 2022
Acknowledgments

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 indebted to the chorus of contributors and writers whose voices have
helped to make this book what it is. 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 earlier editions 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 book has been greatly strengthened by the critiques from some of the most
knowledgeable minds in this field, who have taken the time to review this book as well
as earlier editions and to share their insights and suggestions with us. This is an enor-
mous 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, 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 insights,
and we also appreciate the support and input from Mary Gros and Corinna Gilbert.
And thanks to Maureen Morrin and to Eric Greenberg, and to John Westman,
­co-founder of Novellus, Inc. and adjunct professor at the Harvard Extension School
and Boston College Carroll School of Management.
Don’s class of “Markets of One” at Menlo College in Spring 2021 contributed to our
insights on Facebook and trust. Thanks to Dr. Julie Edell Britton, who team-­taught the
“Managing Customer Value” course at Duke with Martha for many years, and the smart
students there, and to Rick Staelin, who has always supported the work toward this text-
book 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.
Many thanks to David Allison, CEO of Valuegraphics; to Mike Betzer, CEO of
Hypergiant and formerly an executive at Khoros and Lithium; to Guy Nirpaz, founder

xvii
xviii Acknowledgments

and CEO of Totango; to Zeynep Manco, formerly a consultant in the Istanbul office of
Peppers & Rogers Group; to Roger McNamee, venture fund executive, early investor in
Peppers & Rogers Group, and author of the book Zucked, for his insightful comments
on the threat that Facebook poses both to individual privacy and to the future of
business competition itself; to Karl Wirth, founder of Evergage (now a part of
Salesforce) and author of One-­to-­One Personalization in the Age of Machine Learning;
to Steve White, president and special counsel to CEO at Comcast; to Brooks Bell,
founder of Brooks Bell, a digital marketing agency; and to Karen Ganschow, head of
data sciences at Aware Super in Australia and formerly General Manager Consumer
Marketing and Customer Strategy at National Australia Bank.
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 achievable and very 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, and espe-
cially Marji Chimes, our gratitude for a million things and for putting up with us gen-
erally. We also appreciate the work Tom Lacki has done for 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 professionals who are the winners of the 1to1 Impact Awards and PRG/1to1
Customer Champions, who are best in class at customer value building.
Our executive 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 and
suggestions. 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.
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. Cheerfully and brilliantly
finding, handling, resolving, and tracking inconsistencies, errata, and potential prat-
falls is just part of her genius. If there are any errors left, they are our fault, not hers.
As ever, we remain grateful to our patient and supportive spouses, Pamela
Devenney and Dick Cavett.
About the Authors

Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D., are often credited with having created,
or at least kickstarted, the whole customer-­centric approach to business which
became known as customer relationship management (CRM). In their first book
together, The One to One Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time, they
called the concept “one-to-one marketing.” Since then, they have written 10 more
books further exploring, elucidating, and expanding the subject (see list at the end of
this section).
Over time, the discipline has evolved, new terminologies have been created, and
many of the practices Peppers and Rogers included as elements of one-to-one marketing
would today be considered to be part of the customer-­experience-­management disci-
pline. In the B2B space they would be considered part of the account-­based marketing
(ABM) or customer success management disciplines.
In 1993 they founded the Peppers & Rogers Group, which became a leading
customer-­centric management consulting firm with offices and clients on six
­continents. In 2013 they were inducted into the Direct Marketing Association Hall of
Fame, and in 2016 they were jointly ranked by Satmetrix (now a unit of NICE) as
the world’s number-­one most influential authorities on customer experience
management.
Much sought after as public speakers, Peppers and Rogers have delivered talks or
workshops in about 60 countries around the world. Whenever they speak, they make
it a point to tailor and adapt their messaging for companies in virtually every business
category imaginable. Today, they have once again joined forces to form CX Speakers,
a business exclusively designed to deliver keynote presentations, instruction, workshops,
and thought-­leadership consulting focused exclusively on the customer experience
and all its related topics, which range from digital technologies, disruption, and inno-
vation to customer metrics, social selling, customer success, customer advocacy, trust,
and corporate culture.
Prior to his career as an authority on customer-­centric competition, Don Peppers
served as the CEO of a top-­20 direct marketing agency, and his book Life’s a Pitch: Then
You Buy (1995) chronicles his exploits as a celebrated new-­business rainmaker in the
advertising industry. He holds a B.S. in astronautical engineering from the US Air
Force Academy and a master’s in public affairs from Princeton University’s School of
Public and International Affairs. He also has a popular voice in business media and is
LinkedIn’s most widely followed authority on customer experience, with more than
300,000 followers.

xix
xx About the Authors

Martha Rogers is the founder of Trustability Metrix, a firm designed to help

c­ ompanies understand how to measure and improve their levels of trust by customers,
employees, and business partners. After a career in advertising copywriting and
management, Rogers has taught at several universities, most recently as an adjunct
professor at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, where she codirected
the Teradata Center for Customer Strategy. Rogers has been widely published in
academic and trade journals, including Harvard Business Review, Journal of Advertising
Research, Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, and Journal of Applied Psychology.
She has been named International Sales and Marketing Executives’ Educator of the
Year. Rogers earned her Ph.D. at the University of Tennessee as a Bickel Fellow.
Books by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D:

• The One to One Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time

(Doubleday, 1993).
• Tom Peters: “Book of the Year” (1993)
• BusinessWeek: “Bible of the new marketing” (1994)
• Inc. Magazine: “One of the two or three most important business books
ever written” (1995)
• Enterprise One to One: Tools for Competing in the Interactive Age (Doubleday,
1997).
• Wall Street Journal 5-­Star Rating
• The One to One Fieldbook: The Complete Toolkit for Implementing a 1 to 1
Marketing Program (Doubleday, 1999), coauthored with Bob Dorf.
• The One to One Manager: Real-­World Lessons in Customer Relationship
Management (Doubleday, 1999).
• One to One B2B: Customer Development Strategies for the Business-­to-­Business
World (Doubleday, 2001).
• New York Times Business Best Seller
• Managing Customer Relationships: A Strategic Framework (Wiley, 2011).
• Return on Customer: Creating Maximum Value from Your Scarcest Resource
(Doubleday, 2005).
• One of Fast Company’s “15 Most Important Reads” of 2005
• One of Fast Company’s “25 Best Business Books” in 2007
• Rules to Break & Laws to Follow: How Your Business Can Beat the Crisis of Short-­
Termism (Wiley, 2008).
• Inaugural title in Microsoft’s “Executive Leadership Series”
• Managing Customer Relationships: A Strategic Framework, Second Edition
(Wiley, 2011).
• Extreme Trust: Honesty as a Competitive Advantage (Penguin, 2012).
 About the Authors xxi

• Managing Customer Experience and Relationships: A Strategic Framework, Third

Edition (Wiley, 2016).
• Extreme Trust: Turning Proactive Honesty and Flawless Execution into Long-­Term
Profits (revised and updated Penguin Paperback, 2016).

Books by Don Peppers:

• Life’s a Pitch: Then You Buy (Doubleday, 1995).

• Customer Experience: What, How, and Why Now (BookBaby, 2016).
PART I
Technology’s Rainbow

1
CHAPTER 1
Evolution of Marketing and
the Revolution of Customer
Strategy
No company can succeed without customers. If you don’t have
customers, you don’t have a business. You have a hobby.
—­Don Peppers and Martha Rogers

There can be no doubt that technological progress has irreversibly transformed the
nature of business competition, giving customers much greater power, making
them ever more knowledgeable, connecting them seamlessly to other customers,
and raising their expectations and demands significantly with respect to the prod-
ucts and services they buy.
New technologies also allow an enterprise to treat different customers dif-
ferently, in contrast to the way business was done for virtually the entire twentieth
century, when an enterprise would treat all its customers in basically the same way.
Except for some high-­end products and business-­to-­business (B2B) services, no
enterprise could afford the time and expense required to pay attention to individual
customers, one customer at a time. Instead, enterprises focused on the most com-
mon needs of their “average” customer, and then publicized their product benefits
and attributes in the same way to everyone, in hopes of persuading some of these
average customers to buy. But because of technology, enterprises can now do busi-
ness in an entirely different way. Using computer databases, an enterprise can easily
identify and remember its individual customers, one customer at a time, even if it
has millions of them, paying close attention to the experience it provides to each
customer and to its ongoing relationship with them. Using the internet, along with
technologies such as Wi-­Fi and smartphones, an enterprise can now interact
directly with each of its individual customers and prospective customers, respond-
ing to inquiries, posing questions, and making different offers or suggestions to dif-
ferent customers.

3
4 Chapter 1 Evolution of Marketing

(continued)
And now that enterprises can do these things, competition requires them to do
so. The problem for today’s enterprise is that the old marketing strategies and tac-
tics, having been designed to attract as many average customers as possible for
whatever product or service an enterprise was selling, don’t help much when it
comes to planning the best way to treat different customers differently. Instead, an
enterprise needs a customer strategy, designed to meet different individual cus-
tomers’ different individual needs, and to maximize the amount of business an
enterprise is able to do with each different customer.
The goal of this book is not just to acquaint the reader with the techniques of
managing customer experiences and relationships. The more ambitious goal of
this book is to help the reader understand the essence of customer strategy and how
to apply it to the task of managing a successful enterprise in the 21st century.

This relatively new task that enterprises are now taking on, treating different cus-
tomers differently, goes by a number of different labels and buzzwords. Some refer to
it as “customer centricity” or “customer engagement.” Others may refer to it as “cus-
tomer management” or “customer focus.” But no matter what term is used, the
central premise is that an enterprise should seek to engage its customers, one at a time,
in long-­lasting, mutually valuable relationships, based on trust.
Moreover, to do this successfully, an enterprise must be able to see itself through a
customer’s own eyes. It must learn how to experience what each different customer
experiences, and then take steps to ensure that this experience becomes better, easier,
more convenient, and even more enjoyable for the customer, over the lifetime of that
customer’s relationship with the business. And businesses do this because their man-
agers understand, intuitively, that when a customer has a better experience, the
business will be creating more value, which means that the relationship with this cus-
tomer now has a higher likelihood of increased profitability.
The dynamics of the customer-­enterprise relationship have changed dramatically
over time. Customers have always been at the heart of an enterprise’s long-­term growth
strategies, marketing and sales efforts, product development, labor and resource allo-
cation, and overall profitability directives. Historically, enterprises have encouraged
the active participation of a sampling of customers in the research and development of
their products and services.
But until recently, enterprises have been structured and managed around the
products and services they create and sell. Driven by assembly-­line technology, mass
media, and mass distribution, which appeared at the beginning of the twentieth
century, the Industrial Age was dominated by businesses that sought to mass-­produce
products and to gain a competitive advantage by manufacturing a product that was
perceived by most customers as better than its closest competitor. Product innovation,
therefore, was the important key to business success. To increase its overall market
share, the twentieth-­century enterprise would use mass marketing and mass adver-
tising to reach the greatest number of potential customers.
As a result, most twentieth-­century products and services eventually became highly
commoditized. Branding emerged to offset this
 Evolution of Marketing and the Revolution  5

T
competitors; in fact, branding from its
beginning was, in a way, an expensive sub-
he two-­way brand, or
stitute for relationships companies could branded relationship,
not have with their newly blossomed transforms itself based on
masses of customers. Facilitated by lots the ongoing dialogue
and lots of mass-­media advertising, brands between the enterprise and
have helped add value through familiarity, the customer. The branded
image, and trust. Historically, brands have
relationship is “aware” of the
played a critical role in helping customers
distinguish what they deem to be the best customer (giving new
products and services. A primary enterprise meaning to the term brand
goal has been to improve brand awareness awareness).
of products and services and to increase
brand preference and brand loyalty among consumers. For many consumers, a brand
name has traditionally testified to the trustworthiness or quality of a product or service.
Today, though, more and more, customers say they value brands, but their opinions are
based on their “relationship with the brand.” As a result, brand reputation is becoming
one and the same with customers’ experience with the brand, product, or company
(including relationships).1 Indeed, consumers are often content as long as they can buy
one brand of a consumer packaged good that they know and respect.
For many years, enterprises depended on gaining the competitive advantage from
the best brands. Brands have been untouchable, immutable, and inflexible parts of
the twentieth-­century mass-­marketing era. But in the interactive era of the 21st
century, firms are instead strategizing how to gain sustainable competitive advantage
from the information they gather about customers. As a result, enterprises are creating
a two-­way brand, one that thrives on customer information and interaction. The two-­
way brand, or branded relationship, transforms itself based on the ongoing dialogue
between the enterprise and the customer. The branded relationship is “aware” of the
customer (giving new meaning to the term brand awareness) and constantly changes
to suit the needs of that particular
individual. In current discussions, the
focus is on ways to redefine the brand rep-
utation as more customer oriented, using
C
ompanies are realizing
that what customers say
about them is more
phrases such as “brand engagement with
important than what the
customer,” “brand relationship with cus-
tomer,” and the customer’s “brand companies say about
themselves.

1
Vikas Kumar, “Building Customer-­Brand Relationships through Customer Brand Engagement,”
Journal of Promotion Management 26, no. 7 (July 2020), p. 986–1012, doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/
10496491.2020.1746466, accessed June 7, 2021. Also, Christof Binder and Dominique M. Hanssens
report research on brand valuation of a company at the time of merger or acquisition. They discov-
ered that over a 10-­year period from 2003 to 2013, “brand valuations declined by nearly half (from
18% to 10% [of total company value]) while customer relationship values doubled (climbing from 9%
to 18%). Acquirers have decisively moved from investing into businesses with strong brands to busi-
nesses with strong customer relationships.” See “Why Strong Customer Relationships Trump
Powerful Brands,” Harvard Business Review, April 14, 2015, available at https://hbr.org/2015/04/
why-­strong-­customer-­relationships-­trump-­powerful-­brands, accessed August 17, 2021.
6 Chapter 1 Evolution of Marketing

W
experience.” Add to this the transparency
for brands and rampant ratings for prod-
hat does it mean for an
ucts initiated by social media, and it’s enterprise to focus on
clear why companies are realizing that its customers as the key to
what customers say about them is more competitive advantage? It
important than what the companies say means creating new
about themselves. shareholder value by
deliberately preserving and
growing the value of the
ROOTS OF CUSTOMER customer base.
RELATIONSHIPS AND
EXPERIENCE

Once you strip away all the activities that keep everybody busy every day, the goal of
every enterprise is simply to get, keep, and grow customers (whether those are business-­
to-­consumer [B2C] customers or enterprise business customers [B2B]). This is true for
nonprofits (where the “customers” may be donors or volunteers) as well as for-­profits,
for small businesses as well as large, for public as well as private enterprises. It is true
for hospitals, governments, universities, and other institutions as well. What does it
mean for an enterprise to focus on its customers as the key to competitive advantage?
Obviously, it does not mean giving up whatever product edge or operational effi-
ciencies might have provided an advantage in the past. It does mean using new strat-
egies, nearly always requiring new technologies, to focus on growing the value of the
company by deliberately and strategically growing the value of the customer base.
To some executives, customer relationship management (CRM) is a tech-
nology or software solution that helps track data and information about customers to
enable better customer service. Others think of CRM, or one-­to-­one, as an elaborate
marketing or customer service discipline. We even recently heard CRM described as
“personalized email.” But it’s far more than that.
Managing customer relationships is what companies do to optimize the value of
each customer, because they understand the customer’s perspective and what it is—­
and should be—­like to be a customer. This book is about much more than setting up a
business website or redirecting some of the mass-­media budget into the call-­center
database or cloud analytics or social networking. It’s about increasing the value of
the company through specific customer strategies (see Exhibit 1.1).

EXHIBIT 1.1 Increasing the Value of the Customer Base

Get Acquire more customers.
Keep Retain profitable customers longer.
Win back profitable customers.
Eliminate unprofitable customers.
Grow Upsell additional products in a solution.
Cross-­sell other products and services.
Referrals and word-­of-­mouth benefits.
Reduce the cost to serve customers.
 Roots of Customer Relationships and Experience 7

Companies determined to build suc-
cessful and profitable customer relation-
ships understand that the process of
becoming an enterprise focused on
building its value by building customer
value doesn’t begin with installing tech-
nology, but instead begins with:
• A strategy or an ongoing process
that helps shift the enterprise from
a focus on traditional selling or
manufacturing to a customer focus
while increasing revenues and
profits in both the current period
and the long term.
• The leadership and commitment
necessary to cascade throughout
the organization, and the thinking
and decision-­making capability
that puts customer value and rela-
tionships first as the direct path to
increasing shareholder value.
C
ustomer strategy means
increasing the value of the
customer base. CRM can be
thought of as a set of
business practices designed,
simply, to put an enterprise
into closer and closer touch
with its customers, in order
to learn more about each
one and to deliver greater
and greater value to each
one, with the overall goal of
making each one more
valuable to the firm to
increase the value of the
enterprise.

The reality is that becoming a customer-­strategy enterprise is about using

information to gain a competitive advantage and deliver growth and profit to the firm
by increasing the value of the customer base. In its most generalized form, CRM can be
thought of as a set of business practices designed, simply, to put an enterprise into
closer and closer touch with its customers, in order to learn more about each one and
to deliver greater and greater value to each one, with the overall goal of making each
one more valuable to the firm to increase the value of the enterprise. It is an enterprise-­
wide approach to understanding and influencing customer behavior through mean-
ingful analysis and communications to improve customer acquisition, customer
retention, and customer profitability.2 Customer centricity is distinguishable from

2
Priyanka Meena and Praveen Sahu, “Customer Relationship Management Research from 2000 to
2020: An Academic Literature Review and Classification,” Vision 25, no. 2 (June 2021): 136–58,
https://doi.org/10.1177/0972262920984550; Ju-­Yeon Lee, Shrihari Sridhar, Conor Henderson, and
Robert W. Palmatier, “Effect of Customer-­Centric Structure on Firm Performance,” Marketing
Science Institute Working Paper Series, Report No. 12–111, available at https://www.msi.org/
wp-­content/uploads/2020/06/MSI_Report_12-­1111.pdf, accessed August 17, 2021; Sunil Gupta and
Donald R. Lehmann, Managing Customers as Investments (Philadelphia: Wharton School Publishing,
2005); Robert S. Kaplan, “A Balanced Scorecard Approach to Measure Customer Profitability,”
Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge Web site, August 8, 2005, available at: https://hbswk
.hbs.edu/item/a-­balanced-­scorecard-­approach-­to-­measure-­customer-­profitability, accessed August
17, 2021; Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, The One to One Future (New York: Doubleday Books,
1993); and Fred Reichheld and Rob Markey, The Ultimate Question 2.0: How Net Promoter Companies
Thrive in a Customer Driven World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011).
8 Chapter 1 Evolution of Marketing

C
product centricity and from technology
centricity. These differences will be dis-
ustomer centricity: An
cussed more in Exhibit 1.3 later in enterprise-­wide busi­ness
this chapter. strategy that achieves
Defined more precisely, what makes customer-­specific obje­ct­ives
customer centricity into a truly different by taking customer-­specific
model for doing business and competing actions.
in the marketplace is this: It is an
enterprise-­wide business strategy for achieving customer-­specific objectives by taking
customer-­specific actions. It is enterprise-­wide because it can’t merely be assigned to
marketing if it is to have any hope of success. Its objectives are customer-­specific
because the goal is to increase the value of each customer. Therefore, the firm will
take customer-­specific actions for each customer, often made possible by new
technologies.
In essence, building the value of the customer base requires a business to treat dif-
ferent customers differently. Today, there is a customer-­focus revolution under way
among businesses. It represents an inevitable—­literally, irresistible—­movement. All
businesses will be embracing customer strategies sooner or later, with varying degrees
of enthusiasm and success, for two primary reasons:

1. All customers, in all walks of life, in all industries, all over the world, want to be
individually and personally served.
2. It is simply a more efficient way of doing business.

We find examples of customer-­specific behavior, and business initiatives driven by

customer-­specific insights, all around us:3

• An engaged couple receives customized mobile reminders to choose a venue,

select wedding attire, hire a photographer, and other key milestones, all at the
appropriate time.
• A group of three friends open the web page of the same kitchenware company
that they all have ordered from in the past. Each friend views a different offer
featured on the company home page on their device.
• A woman receives an email before her eight-­month obstetrics appointment that
gives information about what to expect at the appointment and her baby’s stage
of growth. A month later, the same woman receives a notification of her baby’s
immunization appointment that is triggered when she leaves the hospital with
her newborn.

3
Thanks to the SalesForce Marketing Cloud website for inspiring many of these examples; “Marketing
Cloud Customer Stories,” Salesforce, available at https://www.salesforce.com/products/marketing-­
cloud/customer-­stories/, accessed April 14, 2021.
 Roots of Customer Relationships and Experience 9

• An insurance company not only handles a claim for property damage but also
connects the insured party with a contractor in their area who can bypass the
purchasing department and do the repairs directly.
• Instead of sending out the same offer to everyone at the same time, a company
waits for specific trigger behavior from a customer and increases response
rates 25-­fold.
• When logging in to buy tickets from a website, a father taking his tween daughter
to a concert experiences a very different customer journey than does his twenty-­
something son who logs into the same site.
• Through the same phone app they used to check their flight status, an airline
passenger in the airport waiting to board is offered an upgrade to business class
as an apology for a 45-­minute departure delay.
• An outdoor gear company sees that their tents are being discussed on a social
channel and sends a free tent as a trial sample to a consistent product supporter.
• A supervisor orders more computer components by going to a web page that
displays the firm’s contract terms, their own spending to date, and the depart-
mental authorizations.
• Sitting in the call center, a service rep sees a “smart dialogue” suggestion (see
Chapter 8) pop onto a monitor during a call with a customer, suggesting a
question the company wants to ask that customer. (The company is not asking
all customers who call that week the same question.)
• A customer service representative sees a complaint a customer has made on
a social channel and, at the same time, is able to view their purchasing history
and order status. The service rep uses that information to reply to the complaint
via the same social channel.
• An online cosmetics customer receives personalized offers when they open the
company website, and promotional coupons are automatically applied to their
shopping cart.
• A business sees that a customer has left their website, abandoning a cart with
selected products before checkout, and makes sure that when the customer calls
up their news online the next day, they get a reminder or a sweetener to go back
and complete the order.

Taking customer-­specific action, treating different customers differently, improving

each customer’s experience with the company or product, building the value of the
customer base, creating and managing relationships with individual customers that go
on through time to get better and deeper—­that’s what this book is about. Note that in
the case of consumers, this can be conducted in a way that is simultaneously custom-
ized and yet efficiently automated. In the chapters that follow, we will look at lots of
examples. The overall business goal of this strategy is to make the enterprise as profitable
as possible over time by taking steps to increase the value of the customer base. The
enterprise makes itself, its products, and/or its services so satisfying, convenient, or
valuable to the customer that they become more willing to devote their time and
10 Chapter 1 Evolution of Marketing

T
money to this enterprise than to any com-
petitor. A customer-­strategy enterprise
he overall business goal
interacts directly with an individual cus- of this strategy is to make
tomer. The customer tells the enterprise the enterprise as profitable
about how they would like to be served. as possible over time by
Based on this interaction, the enterprise, taking steps to increase the
in turn, modifies its behavior with respect value of the customer base.
to this particular customer. In essence, the
concept implies a specific, one-­customer-­
to-­one-­enterprise relationship, as is the case when the customer’s input drives the
enterprise’s output for that particular customer.4
A suite of buzzwords have come to surround this endeavor, in addition to cus-
tomer relationship management (CRM): one-­to-­one marketing, customer experi-
ence management, customer value management, customer focus, customer
orientation, customer centricity, customer experience journey mapping,
and more.
You can see it in the titles on the business cards—­chief marketing officer, of
course, but also a host of others, such as:

• Customer success manager (B2B)

• Chief customer officer (B2C)
• Chief relationship officer
• Customer care leader
• Customer experience manager
• Customer experience advocate
• Director, customer experience and digital design
• Customer value management director
• Chief revenue officer
• Customer revolutionary

As with all new initiatives, this customer approach (different from the strictly
financial approach or product-­profitability approach of the previous century) suffers
when it is poorly understood, improperly applied, and incorrectly measured and
managed. But by any name, strategies designed to build the value of the customer base
by building relationships with one customer at a time, or with well-­defined groups of
identifiable customers, are by no means ephemeral trends or fads any more than
­computers or connectivity are.

4
Barton Goldenberg, “CXM: Give Your Customers the Experiences They Want,” CRM Magazine 21,
no. 4 (April 2017): 6; Ranjay Gulati, Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your
Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Also see Don Peppers and Martha
Rogers, Ph.D., One to One B2B (New York: Doubleday Broadway Books, 2001).
 Roots of Customer Relationships and Experience 11

A good example of a business offering that benefits from individual customer rela-
tionships can be seen in online banking services, in which a consumer spends sev-
eral hours, usually spread over several sessions, setting up an online account and
inputting payee addresses and account numbers, in order to be able to pay bills
electronically each month. If a competitor opens a branch in town offering slightly
lower checking fees or higher savings rates, this consumer is unlikely to switch
banks. They have invested time and energy in a relationship with the first bank, and
it is simply more convenient to remain loyal to the first bank than to teach the sec-
ond bank how to serve them in the same way. In this example, it should also be
noted that the bank now has increased the value of the customer to the bank and
has simultaneously reduced the cost of serving the customer, as it costs the bank
less to serve a customer online than at the teller window or by phone.

Clearly, customer strategy involves much more than marketing, and it cannot
deliver optimum return on investment of money or customers without integrating
individual customer information into every corporate function, from customer service
to production, logistics, and channel management. A formal change in the organiza-
tional structure usually is necessary to become an enterprise focused on growing cus-
tomer value. As this book shows, customer strategy is both an operational and an
analytical process. Operational CRM focuses on the software installations and the
changes in process affecting the day-­to-­day operations of a firm—­operations that will
produce and deliver different treatments to different customers. Analytical CRM
focuses on the strategic planning needed to build customer value as well as the cultural,
measurement, and organizational changes required to implement that strategy
successfully.

How to Think About Relationships and Customer Experience

as Key to Business Strategy
The move to a customer-­strategy business model has come of age at a critical junc-
ture in business history, when managers are deeply concerned about declining cus-
tomer loyalty as a result of greater transparency and universal access to information,
declining trust in many large institutions and most businesses, and increasing choices
for customers. As customer loyalty decreases, profit margins decline, too, because the
most frequently used customer acquisition tactic is price cutting. Enterprises are fac-
ing a radically different competitive landscape as the information about their cus-
tomers is becoming more plentiful and as the customers themselves are demanding
more interactions with companies and creating more connections with each other.
Thus, a coordinated effort to get, keep, and grow valuable customers has taken on a
greater and far more relevant role in forging a successful long-­term, profitable
business strategy.
If the last quarter of the twentieth century heralded the dawn of a new competitive
arena, in which commoditized products and services have become less reliable as the
source for business profitability and success, it is the new computer technologies and
12 Chapter 1 Evolution of Marketing

applications that have arisen that assist companies in managing their interactions with
customers. These technologies have spawned enterprise-­wide information systems
that help to harness information about customers, analyze the information, and use
the data to serve customers better. Technologies such as enterprise resource planning
(ERP) systems, supply chain management (SCM) software, enterprise application
integration (EAI) software, data warehousing, sales force automation (SFA),
marketing resource management (MRM), and a host of other enterprise software
applications have helped companies to mass-­customize their products and services,
literally delivering individually configured communications, products, or services to
unique customers in response to their individual feedback and specifications.
The accessibility of the new technologies is motivating enterprises to reconsider
how they develop and manage customer relationships and map the customer experi-
ence journey. More and more chief executive officers (CEOs) of leading enterprises
have identified shifting to a customer-­strategy business model as a top business pri-
ority for the 21st century. Technology is making it possible for enterprises to conduct
business at an intimate, individual customer level. Indeed, technology is driving the
shift. Computers can enable enterprises to remember individual customer needs and
estimate the future potential revenue the customer will bring to the enterprise. What’s
clear is that technology is the enabler; it’s the tail, and the one-­to-­one customer rela-
tionship is the dog.

Traditional Marketing Redux

Historically, traditional marketing efforts have centered on the four Ps—­ product,
price, promotional activity, and place—­popularized by marketing experts E. Jerome
McCarthya and Philip Kotler.b These efforts have been enhanced by our greater (and
deeper) understanding of consumer behavior, organizational behavior, market
research, segmentation, and targeting. In other words, using traditional sampling and
aggregate data, a broad understanding of the market has preceded the application of
the four Ps, which enterprises have deployed in their marketing strategy to bring uni-
form products and services to the mass market for decades.c In essence, the four Ps are
all about the “get” part of “get, keep, and grow customers.” These terms have been the
focal point for building market share and driving sales of products and services to
consumers. The customer needed to believe that the enterprise’s offerings would be
superior in delivering the “four Cs”: customer value, lower costs, better convenience,
and better communication.d Marketing strategies have revolved around targeting
broadly defined market segments through heavy doses of advertising and promotion.
This approach first began to take shape in the 1950s. Fast-­growing living stand-
ards and equally fast-­rising consumer demand made organizations aware of the
effectiveness of a supply-­driven marketing strategy. By approaching the market on
the strength of the organization’s specific abilities, and creating a product supply in
accordance with those abilities, it was possible for the firm to control and guide the
 Roots of Customer Relationships and Experience 13

(continued)

sales process. Central to the strategic choices taken in the area of marketing were
the—­now traditional—­marketing instruments of product, price, place, and
promotion—­the same instruments that served as the foundation for Philip Kotler’s
theory and the same instruments that still assume an important role in marketing
and customer relations today.
The four Ps all, of course, relate primarily to the aggregate market rather than
to individual customers. The market being considered could be a large mass market
or a smaller niche market, but the four Ps have helped define how an enterprise
should behave toward all the customers within the aggregate market:

1. Product is defined in terms of the average customer—­what most members

of the aggregate market want or need. This is the product brought to mar-
ket, and it is delivered the same way for every customer in the market. The
definition of product extends to standard variations in size, color, style,
and units of sale as well as customer service and aftermarket service
capabilities.
2. Place is a distribution system or sales channel. How and where is the
product sold? Is it sold in stores? By dealers? Through franchisees? At a
single location or through widely dispersed outlets, such as fast-­food
stores and ATMs? Can it be delivered directly to the purchaser?
3. Price refers not only to the ultimate retail price a product brings but also
to intermediate prices, beginning with wholesale; and it takes account of
the availability of credit to a customer and the prevailing interest rate. The
price is set at a level designed to “clear the market,” or the highest price
that will sell the product easily and widely, assuming that everyone will
pay the same price—­which seems only fair because everyone will get the
same product. And even though different customers within a market
actually have different levels of desire for the same product, the market
price will generally be the same for everybody.
4. Promotion has also worked traditionally in a fundamentally nonaddress-
able, noninteractive way. The various customers in a mass market are all
passive recipients of the promotional message, whether it is delivered
through mass media or interpersonally, through salespeople. Marketers
have traditionally recognized the trade-­off between the cost of delivering
a message and the benefit of personalizing it to a recipient. A sales call can
cost between $300 and $500 (a 2012 Center for Exhibition Industry
Research study put the average cost of a business-­to-­business [B2B] sales
call at $596),e but at least it allows for the personalization of the promo-
tion process. The cost per thousand (CPM) to reach an audience through
mass media is far lower but requires that the same message be sent to
everyone. Ultimately, the way a product is promoted is designed to dif-
ferentiate it from all the other competitive products. Except for different
messages aimed at different segments of the market, promotion doesn’t
change by customer but by product.
14 Chapter 1 Evolution of Marketing

(continued)
a
E. Jerome McCarthy, Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach (Homewood, IL: Irwin, 1958), is
now in its 16th edition, and has been substantially updated.
b
Philip Kotler, S. C. Johnson Distinguished Professor of International Marketing, Kellogg School
of Management, Northwestern University (emeritus), is widely known as the father of modern
marketing. His textbook Marketing Management, coauthored with Kevin Keller, has become the
foundational text for marketing courses around the globe. First published in 1976 by Prentice
Hall, it is now in its 16th edition.
c
Philip Kotler, Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning, Implementation, and Control, 9th ed.
(Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997), pp. 92–93.
d
Philip Kotler, Kotler on Marketing (New York: Free Press, 1999), pp. 116–120.
e
Bloomberg Business, “Sales Moves Beyond Face-­to-­Face Deals onto the Web,” January 10, 2013,
available at: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-­01-­10/sales-­moves-­beyond-­face-­to-­
face-­deals-­onto-­the-­web, accessed August 17, 2021; “The Cost of a Sales Call,” 4D Sales, accessed
February 3, 2016, available at: http://4dsales.com/the-­cost-­of-­a-­sales-­call/, accessed August 17, 2021.

Continuing Roles for Mass Media and Branding

• Communicate to nonusers who have not yet raised their hands.

• Build image and brand identity.
• Establish a brand position with nonusers to help users make a statement
about their own image.

INITIAL ASSESSMENT: WHERE IS A FIRM ON THE CUSTOMER

STRATEGY MAP?

Recognizing that two families of technology have mandated the competitive approach
of building customer value by building customer relationships, we can map any
organization—­large or small, public or private, for-­profit or nonprofit—­by the level of
its capabilities in the arenas of interacting with customers and tailoring for them. A
company would be rated high on the interactivity dimension if it knows the names of
its individual customers and if it can send different messages to different customers
and can remember the feedback from each one. A low rating would go to a company
that doesn’t know its customers’ identities, or does but continues to send the same
message the same way to everybody. On the tailoring dimension, a firm would rate
highly if it mass-­customizes in lot sizes of one; it would rate low if it sells the same
thing pretty much the same way to everybody. Based on its rating in these two dimen-
sions, a company can be pinpointed on the Enterprise Strategy Map (see Exhibit 1.2),
which includes four quadrants:

Quadrant I: Traditional Mass Marketing. Companies that compete primarily on cost

efficiencies based on economies of scale and low price. Companies in this quad-
rant are doomed to commoditization and price competition.
 Initial Assessment: Where Is a Firm on the Customer Strategy Map? 15

III IV

Ability to interact
Database 1to1 Learning
with customers
Marketing Relationships
individually

Interacting
I II
Customers
Mass Niche
addressed only in
Marketing Marketing
mass media

Standard Tailoring Tailored

products products

EXHIBIT 1.2 Enterprise Strategy Map

Source: Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D., Enterprise One to One (New York: Doubleday/
Currency, 1997).

Quadrant II: Niche Marketing. Companies that focus on target markets, or niches, and
produce goods and services designed for those defined customer groups. This
more strategic and targeted method of mass marketing still offers the same thing
the same way to everyone, but for a small, relatively homogeneous group.
Quadrant III: Database Marketing. Companies utilize database management to get
better, more efficient use of their mailing lists and other customer information.
Generally focused primarily on continuation of traditional strategies but at lower
costs to serve.
Quadrant IV: Learning Relationships. These are based on individual analytics. Com-
panies use data about customers to predict what each one needs next and then are
able to treat different customers differently and increase mutual value with
customers.

In Quadrants I through III, the focus is still primarily on the product to be sold,
with an eye to finding customers for that product. In Quadrant IV, the direction of the
strategy changes; the Quadrant IV company focuses on a customer and finds products
for that customer.
To realize the highest possible return on the customer base, the goal of an enterprise
will be to move up and to the right on the Enterprise Strategy Map.
To move up on the Enterprise Strategy Map, an enterprise has to be able to recog-
nize individual customers’ names and addresses, or at least coded identities, to send
different messages to different customers, and to remember the responses of each.
To move to the right on the Enterprise Strategy Map, an enterprise has to be able
to increase its production and logistics flexibility. The most flexible production would
16 Chapter 1 Evolution of Marketing

entail customizing and delivering individual products for individual customers. The
least flexible would be mass-­producing a standardized product or service for a large
market. (We talk more about customization in Chapter 10.)

COMPARING MARKET-SHARE AND SHARE-OF-CUSTOMER

STRATEGIES

The story goes that in 1996, the executives at Barnes & Noble bookstores invited Jeff
Bezos, the founder of a startup named Amazon.com, to lunch, with a proposition.
Amazon.com had not yet made any profit (and would not, for its first 28 quarters in a
row), so the nice guys at the well-­established bookstore offered, as a favor to Jeff, to buy
him out—­before they launched barnesandnoble.com, the online version of the book-
store chain. They argued that Jeff’s relatively unknown brand would not stand up to
their highly popular name and that he should make some money on his software and
systems. He declined.
How did that turn out? Twenty-­five years after that lunch meeting, Barnes & Noble
was acquired by Elliott Management Corporation for US$683 million and Amazon.
com had a market cap of US$1.7 trillion.5 When he stepped down as Amazon’s CEO in
2021, Bezos was the richest man on earth. So whether the lunch ever really took place
or not, the story still serves to illustrate the fundamental difference between a very well
run product-­oriented company (Barnes & Noble, which has stores to populate with
products and tries to find customers for those products) and a fairly well run customer-­
oriented company (Amazon.com, which got us all as customers to buy books and
DVDs, and now wants to sell each of us everything). Note: One of this book’s authors,
who lives in New York City, found the best selection and service from Amazon.com
when she was looking for a refrigerator to buy and have installed in her Upper West
Side apartment.
A lot can be understood about how traditional, market-­driven competition is differ-
ent from today’s customer-­driven competition by examining Exhibit 1.3. The direction
of success for a traditional aggregate-­market enterprise (i.e., a traditional company that
sees its customers in markets of aggregate groups) is to acquire more customers (widen
the horizontal bar), whereas the direction of success for the customer-­driven enterprise
is to keep customers longer and grow them bigger (lengthen the vertical bar). The width
of the horizontal bar can be thought of as an enterprise’s market share—­the proportion
of total customers who have their needs satisfied by a particular enterprise, or the
percentage of total products in an industry sold by this particular firm. But the customer-­
value enterprise focuses on share of customer—­ the percentage of this customer’s

5
Colin Dwyer, “Barnes & Noble Set to Be Sold to Elliott Management for about $683 Million,” NPR,
June 7, 2019, available at https://www.npr.org/2019/06/07/730638739/barnes-­noble-­set-­to-­be-­sold-­
to-­elliott-­management-­for-­about-­683-­million, accessed August 17, 2021; “Amazon.com, Inc.
Common Stock (AMZN),” Nasdaq, available at https://www.nasdaq.com/market-­activity/stocks/
amzn, accessed August 17, 2021.
 Comparing Market-Share and Share-of-Customer Strategies 17
Customer
Needs Maximizing the value
Satisfied created by each customer
Share of
Customer

Customer Centricity
Maximizing the value
created by each product

Product Centricity

Market Share

Customers Reached

EXHIBIT 1.3 Objective of Customer Centricity

business that a particular firm gets—­represented by the height of the vertical bar. Think
of it this way: Kellogg’s can either sell as many boxes of Corn Flakes as possible to who-
ever will buy them, even though sometimes Corn Flakes will cannibalize Raisin Bran
sales, or Kellogg’s can concentrate on making sure its products are on Mrs. Smith’s
breakfast table every day for the rest of her life, thus representing a steady or growing
percentage of that breakfast table’s offerings. Toyota can try to sell as many RAV4s as
possible, for any price, to anyone who will buy; or it can, by knowing Mrs. Smith better,
make sure all the cars in Mrs. Smith’s garage are Toyota brands, including the used car
she buys for her teenage son, and that Mrs. Smith uses Toyota financing, and gets her
service, maintenance, and repairs at Toyota dealerships throughout her driving lifetime.
Although the tasks for growing market share are different from those for building
share of customer, the two strategies are not antithetical. A company can simulta-
neously focus on getting new customers and growing the value of and keeping the
customers it already has.6 Customer-­strategy enterprises are required to interact with
a customer and use that customer’s feedback from this interaction to deliver a custom-
ized product or service. Market-­driven efforts can be strategically effective and even
more efficient at meeting individual customer needs when a customer-­specific philos-
ophy is conducted on top of them. The customer-­driven process is time-­dependent and
evolutionary, as the product or service is continuously fine-­tuned and the customer is
increasingly differentiated from other customers.
The principles of a customer-­focused business model differ in many ways from mass
marketing. Specifically: The aggregate-­market enterprise competes by differentiating
products, whereas the customer-­driven enterprise competes by differentiating customers.
The traditional, aggregate-­market enterprise attempts to establish an actual prod-
uct differentiation (by launching new products or modifying or extending established

6
Bernd W. Wirtz and Peter Daiser, “Business Model Development: A Customer-­Oriented Perspective,”
Journal of Business Models 6, no. 3 (2018): pp. 24-­44; Srividya Sridharan, “Evolve Your Approach to
Acquisition and Retention,” Forrester Research, Inc., December 12, 2012, available at www
.­forrester.com.
18 Chapter 1 Evolution of Marketing

product lines) or a perceived one (with advertising and public relations). The customer-­
driven enterprise caters to one customer at a time and relies on differentiating each
customer from all the others.
The traditional marketing company, no matter how friendly, ultimately sees cus-
tomers as adversaries, and vice versa. The company and the customer play a zero-­sum
game: If the customer gets a discount, the company loses profit margin. Their interests
have traditionally been at odds; the customer wants to buy as much product as possible
for the lowest price, while the company wants to sell the least product possible for the
highest price. If an enterprise and a customer have no relationship prior to a purchase,
and they have no relationship following it, then their entire interaction is centered on
a single, solitary transaction and the profitability of that transaction. Thus, in a
transaction-­based, product-­centric business model, buyer and seller are adversaries,
no matter how much the seller may try not to act the part. In this business model, prac-
tically the only assurance a customer has that they can trust the product and service
being sold to them is the general reputation of the brand itself.7
By contrast, the customer-­based enterprise aligns customer collaboration with
profitability. Compare the behaviors that result from both sides if each transaction
occurs in the context of a longer-­term relationship. For starters, a one-­to-­one enterprise
would likely be willing to fix a problem raised by a single transaction at a loss if the
relationship with the customer were profitable long term (see Exhibit 1.4).

EXHIBIT 1.4 Comparison of Market-­Share and Share-­of-­Customer Strategies

Market-­Share Strategy Share-­of-­Customer Strategy

Treat different products differently. Treat different customers differently.

Maximize the value each product creates.
Focus on each product’s attributes and
benefits.
Differentiate products from competitors.
Sell to customers.
Treat customers as on-­off switches.
Task product managers to find a
continual stream of new customers
for each product.
Use mass media to offer all products
to an audience of potential customers.
Maximize the value each customer
creates.
Focus on each customer’s experience.
Differentiate customers from each other.
Collaborate with customers.
Treat customers as volume dials.
Task customer managers to meet more
needs for each customer.
Use interactive media to learn each
customer’s need and offer the right
product to meet that need.

7
Marco Bertini and John T. Gourville, “Pricing to Create Shared Value,” Harvard Business Review,
June 2012, available at https://hbr.org/2012/06/pricing-­to-­create-­shared-­value, accessed August 17,
2021. See also Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D., The One to One Manager (New York:
Doubleday, 1999).
 Comparing Market-Share and Share-of-Customer Strategies 19

The central purpose of managing customer relationships and experiences is for

the enterprise to focus on increasing the overall value of its customer base—­and cus-
tomer retention is critical to its success. Increasing the value of the customer
base, whether through cross-­selling (getting customers to buy other products and ser-
vices), upselling (getting customers to buy more expensive offerings), or customer
referrals, will lead to a more profitable enterprise. The enterprise can also reduce the
cost of serving its best customers by making it more convenient for them to buy from
the enterprise (e.g., by using Amazon’s one-­click ordering process, or online banking
rather than a bank teller).

And although technology accelerates
customer relationships, it is not the same
as building customer value. While one-­to-­
one customer relationships are enabled by
technology, executives at firms with strong
customer relationships and burgeoning
customer equity (CE) believe that the
enabling technology should be viewed as
the means to an end, not the end itself.
Managing customer experiences and rela-
tionships is an ongoing business process,
not merely a technology.
T
he central purpose of
managing customer
relationships and exper­
iences is for the enterprise to
focus on increasing the
overall value of its customer
base—­and customer reten­
tion is critical to its success.

T
While enterprises are experimenting
with a wide array of technology and soft- he foundation for an
ware solutions from different vendors to enterprise focused on
satisfy their customer-­driven needs, they building its value by building
are learning that they cannot depend on the value of the customer
technology alone to do the job. Before it base is unique: Establish
can be implemented successfully,
managing customer relationships indi-
relationships with customers
vidually requires committed leadership on an individual basis, then
from the upper management of the use the infor­mation
enterprise and wholehearted participa- gathered to treat different
tion throughout the organization as well. customers dif­ferently and
Although customer strategies are driven increase the value of each
by new technological capabilities, the
one to the firm.
technology alone does not make a
company customer-­centric. The payoff
can be great, but the need to build the strategy to get, keep, and grow customers is
even more important than the technology required to implement that strategy.
The foundation for an enterprise focused on building its value by building the
value of the customer base is unique: Establish trustable relationships with customers
on an individual basis, then use the information gathered to treat different customers
differently and increase the value of each one to the firm.
 20 Chapter 1 Evolution of Marketing

The firms that are best at building customer value are not the ones that ask, “How
can we use new technologies to get our customers to buy more?” Instead they are
the companies that ask, “How can we use new technologies to deliver more value to
our customers?”

WHAT IS A RELATIONSHIP? IS THAT DIFFERENT

FROM CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE?

What does it mean for an enterprise and a customer to have a relationship with each
other? Do customers have relationships with enterprises that do not know them? Can
the enterprise be said to have a relationship with a customer it does not know? Is a
relationship possible if the company knows the customer and tailors offers and com-
munications, remembers things for the customer, and deliberately builds customer
experience—­even if the customer is not aware of a relationship? Is it possible for a
customer to have a relationship with a brand? Perhaps what is thought to be a cus-
tomer’s “relationship with a brand” is more accurately described as the customer’s
attitude or predisposition toward the brand. This attitude is a combination of impres-
sions from actual experiences with that brand, as well as what one has heard about the
brand from ads (company-­originated communication), from news, and from others
(comments from friends and ratings by strangers). Experts have studied the nature of
relationships in business for many years, and there are many different perspectives on
the fundamental purpose of relationships in business strategies.
This book is about managing customer relationships and experiences more effec-
tively in the 21st century, which is governed by a more individualized approach. The
critical business objective can no longer be limited to acquiring the most customers
and gaining the greatest market share for a product or service. Now that it’s possible to
deal individually with separate customers,

M
the business objective must include estab-
lishing meaningful and profitable rela- anaging the customer
tionships with, at the least, the most relationship is all about
valuable customers, and making the what the company does, and
overall customer base more valuable. customer expe­rience is what
Technological advances during the last
the customer feels like as
quarter of the twentieth century have
mandated this shift in philosophy. a result.
In short, the enterprise strives to get a customer, keep that customer for a lifetime,
and grow the value of the customer to the enterprise. Relationships are the crux of the
customer-­strategy enterprise. Relationships between customers and enterprises pro-
vide the framework for everything else connected to the customer-­value business
model, even if the customer is not aware of the relationship. After all, the customer is
aware of what they experience with the company. In fact, we could say that managing
the customer relationship is all about what the company does, and customer experience is
what the customer feels like as a result. The exchange between a customer and the

Peppers815334_c01.indd 20 04-03-2022 20:10:20

  What Is a Relationship? Is That Different from Customer Experience? 21

enterprise becomes mutually beneficial, as customers give information in return for

personalized service that meets their individual needs. This interaction forms the basis
of the Learning Relationship, based on a collaborative dialogue between the enterprise
and the customer that grows smarter and smarter with each successive interaction.8

Who Is the Customer?

Throughout this book, we refer to customers in a generic way. To some, the term will
conjure up the mental image of shoppers. To others, those shoppers are end users or
consumers, and the customers are upstream businesses in the distribution chain—­the
companies that buy from producers and either sell directly to end users or manufac-
ture their own product. In this book, customer refers to the constituents of an organi-
zation, whether it’s a business-­to-­business (B2B) customer (which could mean the
purchasing agent or user at the customer company, or the entire customer company)
or business-­to-­consumer (B2C) customer (an individual or a family/household)—­or,
for that matter, a hotel patron, a hospital patient, a charitable contributor, a voter, a
university student or alumnus, a blood donor, a theme-­park guest, and so on. That
means the competition is anything a customer might choose that would preclude
choosing the organization that is trying to build a relationship with that customer.
The word customer includes both current and prospective buyers and users.

How to Think about Customer Experience

In our view, any useful definition of customer experience should be based on

straightforward language, while at the same time clearly differentiating the term
from all the other marketing terms and buzzwords, such as customer service, brand
preference, customer satisfaction, CRM, or customer loyalty. (See Chapter 3 for a
deeper dive into customer experience.)
Customer experience is the sum total of a customer’s individual interactions
with a product or company, over time.

• Individual means that we are talking about each different customer’s own
individual perception or impression of the experience. What you intend to
provide a customer is not nearly so important as how the customer perceives
what you provide.
• Interactions occur in addressable or reciprocal channels, that is, outside of
mass media. Marketing campaigns, taglines, and brand messages may be
important, but they aren’t interactions, so they lie outside the domain of
­customer experience. By contrast, improving your mobile app by, for instance,

8
B. Joseph Pine II, Don Peppers, and Martha Rogers, Ph.D., “Do You Want to Keep Your Customers
Forever?” Harvard Business Review 73, no. 2 (March–April 1995): 103–114.

Peppers815334_c01.indd 21 04-03-2022 20:10:20

Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
advantage over the propeller type in the removal of dust lies in the
fact that they overcome greater internal resistance, and a uniform
high velocity in a complicated system of pipes can thus more easily
be maintained.

Fig. 3 shows adjustable hoods and ducts fitting closely over rollers for mixing
coloured inks, and serving not only to prevent inhalation of lead dust by the
workers, but also the colour from one machine affecting that on another. In the
particular room where the installation is fitted there are thirteen separate sets of
rollers; the diameter of the branch duct of each machine is about 5 inches, and
that of the main duct close to the fan about 20 inches. The special points we
have considered as to entrance of all branch ducts into the main duct
tangentially, gradual tapering of the main trunk, and collection of the dust in
filter-bags, are noticeable. Further, when one set of rollers is not in use the
raising of the hood automatically cuts off the draught through it. (Drawing
supplied by the Sturtevant Engineering Company, Limited, London.)

Ducts.—The main duct should be of metal (steel, sheet-iron, or

zinc); it should be circular in shape, have as straight and short a
course as possible, and be tapered in such manner that the area of
cross-section at any point shall equal the combined areas of all the
branch pipes which have entered it at that point (Fig. 3). Proper
dimensions must be studied in relation to the size of the fan and the
work to be done. Wooden ducts, unless chosen for specific reasons,
such as the presence of acid in the fumes to be removed, are very
unsatisfactory, as it is difficult to maintain them in an air-tight
condition or to make branch pipes enter with rounded junctions.
Where several branch ducts enter a main duct, situation of the fan
midway between them has advantage, not only in saving metal in
piping, but also in causing the distance of the fan from the farthest
branch duct to be only half what it would be were the fan placed at
the end of the system (see Fig. 7, p. 217). Further, the sectional area
of the two collecting ducts will be less than that of one main duct,
and greater uniformity of flow thereby secured. Where the two ducts
join up into the single duct of the fan, the bends must be easy;
otherwise the draughts would collide and neutralize one another.
Branch ducts, if they cannot be made tangential to a rounded curve,
should enter the main duct at an angle of 30 degrees, as by so doing
equalization of the draught at different openings is made fairly
uniform. The very common defect of a right-angle joint diminishes
the draught by nearly one-half. Branch ducts should never be made
to enter a main duct on the outer side of a bend, because at this
point the pressure of the current of air inside the duct is increased.
They should join up on the inside of a bend, where the pressure is
reduced.
Hoods and Air-Guides.—As the object of hoods is to
concentrate the draught on the fumes or dust to be removed from
the worker, position in regard to origin of the fumes or dust requires
first consideration. The more restricted the opening consistent with
unimpeded work, the more effective is the draught, and the less
disturbed will it be by cross-currents in the workroom. Pendock lays
it down as a useful principle that the area of the front opening into
the hood should not be more than four times that of the exhaust
throat—i.e., the point of junction of the hood and duct (Fig. 4). Not
less important is it that the draught should operate below the
breathing level. Preference as to the direction to be given to the
exhaust current should be in the order named: (1) Downwards; (2)
downwards and backwards combined; (3) backwards and upwards
combined; and (4) upwards only. Use should be made, for the
removal of the fumes or dust, of any initial current of hot air set up
from a bath of molten metal or from a heated metallic surface, as in
vitreous enamelling. Hence under such circumstances only (3) and
(4) need be considered. Generally hoods applied err in having too
wide an opening, or they are placed too far away from the source of
danger. They require sometimes to be adjustable to suit different-
sized articles. Care is necessary to see that, when a hood has been
adjusted for large articles, it is readjusted for smaller-sized articles.
The principle of ventilation downwards and backwards is recognized
as right for grinding and polishing on a wheel, since the tangential
current set up by the wheel in its rotation is utilized. Pug-mills in
paint-works are perhaps best ventilated by applying the exhaust to a
dome-shaped hood covering the posterior half of the mill. Edge-
runners must be encased, with an exhaust pipe attached to the
casing and sliding doors or shutters for introduction or removal of
material (Fig. 5). A small negative pressure inside the casing is all
that is necessary, so as to insure passage of air inwards and not
outwards. Branch ducts must protect the casks out of which material
is scooped, and the receptacle into which it is discharged. In
scooping out dry colour from a barrel, it is unwise to attempt to
remove the dust created at every displacement of air on removal of a
scoopful by means of a hood suspended over the barrel. Instead, the
last joint of the duct should be a telescopic one, so that it can be
lowered into the barrel, and be kept at a distance of about 6 inches
above the material. The air is thus drawn downwards into the barrel
(Fig. 6).
Fig. 4 shows a well-designed arrangement of hoods, duct, and fan, in the packing
of white lead, and the filter-bags for collecting the dust so removed. An
additional safeguard is introduced, as the casks stand upon grids through which
a down-draught is maintained by connecting the space underneath with the
exhaust system. (Drawing supplied by the Sturtevant Engineering Company,
Limited, London.)

Processes such as colour-dusting, aerographing, ware-cleaning,

enamel-brushing, and the like, are best carried out at benches under
hoods with glass tops. Air will enter from in front, and carry the dust
or spray away into the exhaust duct placed at the back of the bench.
Fig. 5 shows a pan mill with edge runners fitted with casing (partially open). The
casing is connected to a powerful fan, and branch ducts with telescopic terminal
sections control the dust in scooping out from the barrel, in feeding into the mill,
and at the point where the ground material is discharged.

Collection of Dust.—Frequently no heed is paid to the

collection of the dust. Sometimes a dust chamber is arranged to
intercept it on the far side of the fan, or attempt is made to blow the
dust into a tank of water. The fine dust of which we are speaking
cannot be satisfactorily collected by either of these methods, nor
even by a cyclone separator, so useful for the collection of many
kinds of dust. In lead works generally, the dust removed by the fan is
best collected in filter-bags made of some porous fabric. Various
efficient filters constructed on these lines by Messrs. Henry Simon,
Ltd.; Messrs. Beth and Co., Ltd.; and the Sturtevant Engineering
Company, Ltd., are on the market.
Fig. 6 shows an arrangement of piping with balanced telescopic joints fitted to a
Sirocco dust fan for removal of dust, in an electric accumulator works, when
scooping out litharge from a cask into the receptacle prior to emptying the
weighed quantity into the mixing machine, also under a hood connected with the
exhaust system. (Illustration supplied by Davidson and Company, Limited,
Belfast.)

In collecting the dust, care must be taken to provide an adequate

outlet for the spent air, so as to prevent creation of a source of
friction in front which might destroy the effectiveness of the
installation.
Fig. 7.—Exhaust Ventilation on the Patent “Pentarcomb” Principle applied
to Linotype and Monotype Machines in Printing Works, as installed by
the Zephyr Ventilating Company, Bristol.
P, Patent “pentarcomb” for equalizing exhaust; V, patent “pentarcomb” for general
ventilation; D, main and branch ducts; F, fan; U, upcast from fan; M, hoods over
metal-pots of monotype machines, constructed to raise and lower, and swing out
and in with metal-pot; L, hoods over metal-pots of linotype machines,
constructed to raise and lower.
In the illustration “pentarcomb” grids connect the branch ducts over the metal-pots
of mono and linotype machines with the main duct. The “pentarcomb” grids are
arranged also elsewhere in the main duct itself to assist in the general
ventilation of the workroom. The hoods over the metal-pots are constructed to
be raised and lowered, and to swing out and in radially with the melting-pot arm.
(Drawings supplied by the Zephyr Ventilating Company, Bristol.)

In order to secure equality of flow from a number of branched

ducts, the Zephyr Ventilating Company apply a special grating of
curved and slanting inlets—the “pentarcomb”—to each branch duct.
The air passing through the comb is split up into numerous small
columns, and the inclination of the curve which each is made to take
is such as to reduce friction to a minimum. By means of this device
we have found, in a trunk with twenty branches, the draught at the
one farthest from the fan as serviceable as that next to it. The
method is illustrated applied locally to remove the fumes from
linotype machines, and generally in the main duct for removal of foul
air near the ceiling.
Where electricity is available as a motive power for driving the fan,
some modification in the views expressed as to the curvature of the
pipes and system of installation can be allowed. In a red lead plant,
for instance, it may be desirable to have the pipes leading to the
sifter or packing machine with sharp angles, so as to prevent
tendency of such heavy dust to collect in them. The electric current
allows a fan to be installed at any point desired; and if applied with
knowledge that the increased friction due to an acute angle has to be
overcome, the result may be quite satisfactory.
The various forms of vacuum cleaning apparatus with
mouthpieces designed to aspirate the dust from different surfaces
are sure to be increasingly used. In our opinion, wherever electric
power is available, they will obviate barbarous methods involving use
of hand-brushes to collect dust from machines, such as those for
litho-dusting or for sweeping lead dust from benches and floors, or
use of bellows to blow out the dust from compositors’ cases.
Finally, the carrying out of lead processes by automatic methods
and with the interior of the casing under a negative pressure, so that
the material is transported from one process to another by means of
worms or conveyors, is everywhere to be aimed at. Or, again, it has
been found possible on a commercial scale, by means of
compressed air in a closed system of receivers and pipes, to force
material in very fine state of division from one place to another, as,
for instance, of litharge from the cask into the mixing machine for
preparation of the paste for manufacture of accumulator plates,
without risk of contact.
Indication of the efficiency of the draught may be gained by
holding smoke-paper at the orifice of the hood. The definition of
efficient exhaust in some regulations for the removal of fumes, as in
the Tinning Regulations, is that it shall not be deemed to be efficient
unless it removes smoke generated at the point where the fume
originates. Accurate gauging, however, of the draught can only be
done with an anemometer, so as to determine the number of linear
and cubic feet passing through the throat per minute. Only rarely
does one find an occupier alive to the value of the use of such an
instrument. The importance of this point has been recognized in the
Regulations for Heading of Yarn, by the requirement that the speed
of each exhaust opening shall be determined once in every three
months at least, and recorded in the general register. We prefer to
use Davis’s[A] self-timing anemometer, which gives readings in feet
per second without the need of a watch. Other useful anemometers
—Casella’s or Negretti and Zambra’s—require to be timed.
[A] It is not available for velocities exceeding 1,200 linear feet per minute.

The details of all routine observations on localized exhaust

ventilation might well be entered on a card hung up in the workroom.
Such a card drawn up by our colleagues, Miss Lovibond and Mr. C.
R. Pendock, has the following headings:

FIRM .......... PROCESS ..........

Fans: No. .......... Kind ..........
Motive power ..........
Other load ..........
Screen ..........
Direction ..........
Periodic cleaning ..........
Hoods: No. .......... Kind ..........
Size ..........
Maker ..........
H.P. ..........
Method of driving ...
Condition of driving
Dust collection ..........
Size ..........
 Structure ..........
Distance between each ..........
Ducts: No. .......... Kind ..........
Size .......... Length ..........Section ..........
Structure ..........
Periodic cleaning ..........
Fresh-Air Kind ..........
Inlets: No. .......... Position ..........
Size ..........
Fixed or temporary ..........

Hood: Position Date ..... Date .....

Reference of Anemo- External External
Number. meter. Conditions ..... Conditions ..... Re
Area Volume Area Volume
of Speed C.F. of Speed C.F.
Throat. F. p.m. p.m. Throat. F. p.m. p.m.

Frequent cleaning and inspection of exhaust installations are very

important, as accumulation of dust greatly impedes the flow of air at
all points of the system. The person employed in cleaning the fan
should wear a respirator. Hoods and ducts should always be cleaned
with the exhaust in full action.

REFERENCES.
[1] Annual Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories for 1910, p. 172.
[2] Ibid., pp. 172, 173.
[3] G. Elmhirst Duckering: A Report on an Experimental Investigation into
the Conditions of Work in Tinning Workshops, and Appendices. Included in
Special Report on Dangerous or Injurious Processes in the Coating of Metal
 with Lead or a Mixture of Lead and Tin. Cd. 3793. Wyman and Sons, Ltd.
Price 1s.
G. Elmhirst Duckering: The Cause of Lead Poisoning in the Tinning of
Metals. Journal of Hygiene, vol. viii., pp. 474-503, 1908.
G. Elmhirst Duckering: Report on an Investigation of the Air of Workplaces
in Potteries. Included as Appendix XLIX. in Report of the Departmental
Committee appointed to inquire into the Dangers attendant on the Use of
Lead, and the Danger or Injury to Health arising from Dust and Other
Causes in the Manufacture of Earthenware and China, vol. ii., pp. 93-113,
1910. Cd. 5278. Price 1s. 9d.
[4] G. Elmhirst Duckering: Annual Report of the Chief Inspector of
Factories for 1910, p. 47.
[5] C. R. Pendock (one of H.M. Inspectors of Factories): Report on Systems
of Ventilation in Use in Potteries. Included as Appendix XLVIII. in vol. ii. of
Potteries Committee’s Report referred to under[3].
C. R. Pendock: Second Report of the Departmental Committee appointed to
inquire into the Ventilation of Factories and Workshops, part i., and
especially part ii., 1907. Cd. 3552 and 3553. Price together, 4s. 8d.
Other works referred to include—Construction des Usines au Point de Vue de
l’Hygiène, by Ingénieur-Architecte Maniguet. Ch. Béranger, Paris, 1906;
Hygiène Industrielle, by MM. Leclerc de Pulligny, Boulin, and others. J. B.
Baillière et Fils, Paris, 1908; and many excellently illustrated trade
catalogues issued by ventilating engineering firms, such as the Sturtevant
Engineering Company, Ltd., London; Henry Simon, Ltd., Manchester;
Davidson and Company, Ltd., Belfast; John Gibbs and Son, Liverpool.
 CHAPTER XIII
PREVENTIVE MEASURES AGAINST LEAD
POISONING—Continued

Periodical Examination.—In various codes of regulations a

surgeon is required to make periodical medical examination of the
workers. The term “surgeon” is defined as the “Certifying Factory
Surgeon of the district, or a duly qualified medical practitioner,
appointed by written certificate of the Chief Inspector of Factories,
which appointment shall be subject to such conditions as may be
specified in that certificate.” The wording of the regulation varies
somewhat in different codes, but the intention in all is the same, and
the following example from the Tinning Regulations will indicate the
purpose and scope:
“Every person employed in tinning shall be examined by the surgeon once in
every three months (or at such shorter or longer intervals as may be prescribed in
writing by the Chief Inspector of Factories), on a day of which due notice shall be
given to all concerned. The surgeon shall have the power of suspension as
regards all persons employed in tinning, and no such person after suspension
shall be employed in tinning without written sanction from the surgeon entered in
the health register.
“Every person employed in tinning shall present himself at the appointed time for
examination by the surgeon. No person employed in tinning shall, after
suspension, work at tinning without written sanction from the surgeon entered in
the health register.”

Under the Special Rules for white-lead works, examination is

required at weekly intervals; under the Special Rules for
Earthenware and China, Manufacture of Litho-Transfers and Red
Lead, and under the Regulations for Electric Accumulators, and
Paints and Colours, monthly; under the Regulations for Tinning, Yarn
dyed with Chromate of Lead, and Enamelling, at quarterly intervals,
subject to the limitation or extension specified in the regulation
quoted.
The limitation as to quarterly examination is useful to meet
conditions, on the one hand, where special incidence calls for
increased safeguards; and, on the other, relaxation, by reason of
adoption of special processes or measures lessening risk. Thus, in a
yarn-dyeing factory, in consequence of occurrence of six cases
within five months, a weekly instead of a quarterly examination was
prescribed. After eight months, as no further cases were reported, a
monthly examination was substituted for the weekly, and eventually,
with continued absence of illness, the normal quarterly examination
was resumed.
An appointed time for the surgeon’s attendance at the factory has
been found necessary, because, in conformity with the literal wording
of the regulation, the occupier should not continue to employ a
worker who, for one reason or another, has not been examined by
the surgeon during the prescribed interval. With knowledge of the
date and hour posted in a conspicuous place in the factory, excuse
for absence becomes difficult. Alteration by the surgeon of his
appointed time should, whenever possible, be given beforehand.
Surgeons in the past frequently made examination of the persons
employed with the view of taking them unawares, and so of
precluding special preparation beforehand—a practice which had its
advantages; but they are outweighed by the hardship inflicted on
workers who were unavoidably absent, as, for example, night-
workers. A health register is supplied to all occupiers where
periodical medical examination is enjoined, the headings of which
and manner of entry are indicated later on in this chapter.
The objects which the surgeon should have in mind in making his
examination are:
1. To prevent lead poisoning and minimize lead absorption.
2. To obtain information for the occupier and Inspector of Factories
of the relative danger of one process and another with a view to
adoption of remedial measures.
In safeguarding the health of the workers, he should make effort to
gain their confidence, in order to be able to attach proper value to
statement as to subjective symptoms. Suspicion in their minds that
the examination is made solely in the interests of the employer
militates against success, and increases inclination to conceal
symptoms and to give untruthful answers as to the state of health
since the last examination. In our opinion, the surgeon will best carry
out the first object by attention to the second. The study of
thousands of reports on cases of lead poisoning convinces us that
90 per cent. at least are due to inhalation of dust and fumes. The
surgeon, therefore, should utilize the earliest sign of lead absorption
to warn the occupier and inspector of conditions favourable to the
development of plumbism, and due probably either to some
unguarded spot in the manufacturing process whereby dust or fumes
are not being removed completely, or to ignorance or carelessness
(often excusable in the absence of proper instruction) on the part of
the worker. He should direct, therefore, especial attention to new
workers, not only because of their need for guidance as to
precautions to be observed and greater liability to attack during the
first year of employment, but also because development of signs in
them constitutes the surest guide to defects in the process of
manufacture. Occasionally symptoms in a worker may be so
menacing as to demand immediate suspension, but generally before
the power is exercised attempt to rectify the condition which gives
rise to them should be made. The surgeon can do much by
influencing the foremen and forewomen, who will necessarily come
before him for examination, in insisting on the supervision by them of
care and cleanliness by the workpeople under their charge. Should
suspension, despite attention in the manner suggested, be
necessary, he will recognize that transference to a non-lead process,
if feasible, is preferable to entire cessation from work in very many
cases. The surgeon, therefore, should know what departments are
possible alternatives to lead work.
The fact that an examination is made on factory premises, is
directed to detection and prevention, treatment taking a subordinate
place, and is often made on persons who, unlike hospital patients,
seek to conceal their symptoms, causes it to be an examination sui
generis. Hence the surgeon must trust his sight more than his
hearing. A surgeon with experience of such work has said: “The
worker in lead must be surveyed as an individual, and idiosyncrasies
must be carefully studied and allowed for; the ‘personal equation’ is
of vital importance”[1].
For the examination a well-lighted room affording privacy is
essential. While it is desirable for the surgeon periodically to see the
processes and conditions under which work is carried on, systematic
examinations of workers should not be made elsewhere than in a
private room. The custom of marshalling workers in a queue,
although perhaps unavoidable in many cases, is liable to detract
from the seriousness of the proceedings, a sense of which it should
be one of the aims of the examination to arouse. In discussing the
method of interrogation and usual examination, Dr. King Alcock[2],
Certifying Factory Surgeon of Burslem, says: “Note the general
manner assumed in answering questions and any indications of
carelessness in dress and toilet. Inquire into the state of digestion,
existence of colicky pains, regularity of bowels, menses, history of
pregnancies and miscarriages, whether before, in the intervals of, or
during lead employment; existence of headache, diplopia, or
amaurosis. Note the type, facies, state of teeth and nails,
complexion, speech, tongue, strength of grasp (if possible, with
dynamometer), any tremor in outstretched hand, resistance to
forcible flexion of wrist.... If strabismus is present, note whether of
old standing or recent; and if ocular troubles seem imminent,
examine for optic neuritis, either at once or at home (this is very
important, as cases of acute and serious optic neuritis still baffle
examination by their intermensual development).” He recommends
the surgeon, apart from entry in the health register, which must
necessarily be very brief, to keep a private notebook, and to enter in
it as a matter of routine such details as name, process, age, duration
of employment, condition (married or single), pregnancies, state of
bowels and menses, dental toilet, and any special point worthy of
note in individual workers. A card index, if in use, might conveniently
serve for such entries.
In the actual routine examination it may be useful to describe the
procedure where a large number of workers pass before the surgeon
in a white-lead works every week. The points noted are:
1. The general appearance of the man as he walks forward,
especially the face with regard to anæmia, which in the majority of
cases of early lead absorption is not a true anæmia, but is due to
vaso-motor spasm of the arterioles of the face and eyes. Frequently,
on speaking to a lead-worker, the face, apparently anæmic, flushes
directly.
2. The brightness of the eyes, state of the pupils, and condition of
the conjunctiva and of the ocular muscles.
3. The mouth should next be examined, and search made for any
evidence of blue line around the gum.
4. The gait should be watched both on advancing to, and retiring
from, the surgeon. If necessary, the man should be made to walk a
few steps. Although the peroneal type of palsy is extremely rare, the
possibility of its occurrence should never be absent from the mind of
the surgeon.
5. The man should then be directed to stretch his hands out in
front of him, with wrists extended and fingers widely spread.
Presence or absence of tremor should be looked for, and the
condition of the finger-nails, as to the practice of biting, etc. The
extensor power should then be tested, firstly of the fingers. While the
hands of the workman remain outstretched, the surgeon places the
forefinger of his hand in the outstretched palm of the workman, and
the ball of the thumb upon the extreme tip of each finger, and by
gently pulling it down, noting the spring present in the muscles. This
test is probably the most delicate there is for detection of early
extensor paralysis. The condition of the lumbricals and interossei are
noted on movement of the fingers. The extensors of the wrist are
then further examined, the workman being directed to flex his arm at
the elbow and strongly pronate the wrist, so that the palm of the
hand is directed forwards. He is then told to close the fist when the
surgeon endeavours to flex the wrist, the workman at the same time
resisting by forcible extension of his wrist. Ordinarily the extensor
communis digitorum and minimi digiti are sufficiently powerful to
resist a very powerful pull upon the wrist; and if the wrist is found to
yield, it is a sign that the muscles are affected. Sometimes the
strength of the wrists and fingers is judged by the surgeon placing
his palms on the dorsum of the patient’s outstretched hands, and
seeing whether the patient can be prevented from lifting them
without flexing the wrists or finger-joints.
 The test detects (1) paralysis which has been recovered from to a
large extent; (2) commencing partial paralysis; and (3) weakness of
muscular power, especially in those who have worked in lead for a
number of years. This weakness appears to be an effect of lead
upon the muscular tissue or dependent on debility, the result of lead
absorption, and independent of nerve implication. We have known
the condition to remain unaltered for years, and also to undergo
alteration, being at times absent for months together. Occasionally
reports of definite paralysis refer to pre-existing weakness.
6. The pulse is next noted. The pulse-rate need not ordinarily be
counted, but if it is either very slow or fast careful examination at the
conclusion of the general inspection should be made.
It is well to make all these points before asking any questions.
After they are completed inquiry as to regularity of the bowels,
existence of pain or discomfort, would follow. The speech should be
noted, as slurring or hesitating speech is occasionally associated
with early lead poisoning.
All these points can be gone through quite rapidly, and at the
conclusion of the general examination, if judgment is in suspension,
careful examination in the routine medical manner should be made.
In some factories all new workers are examined by the surgeon
before they commence work in dangerous processes. At any rate, a
list of such persons should be given to the surgeon at his visit, as
naturally the question of personal fitness for employment should be
decided at his first examination. Conditions which should lead to
rejection are tubercular disease of every kind, idiopathic epilepsy, all
forms of mental disease or weakness (hysteria, feeble-mindedness,
and neurasthenia), obvious alcoholism, women who are pregnant or
who give a history of repeated miscarriages prior to work in lead,
persons with marked errors of refraction unless corrected by
glasses, kidney disease of all kinds, evidence of previous chronic
saturnism, and bad oral sepsis. Special attention will have to be paid
to casual labourers, and it should be the aim of the surgeon to
discourage this class of labour in lead industries. Work under special
rules or regulations requires to be carried out under strict discipline,
and this it is extremely difficult to maintain on other than regular
workers, who recognize the need for cleanliness and observance of
regulations.
Other aids to diagnosis cannot be carried out as a matter of
routine, but will necessarily be used in particular cases, such as
ophthalmoscopic examination of the fundus, electrical reactions of
muscles, analysis of the urine, and examination of the blood-
pressure.
A few words may be added on the significance of the two
commonest signs—the blue line and anæmia. It cannot be too
strongly insisted on that presence of the Burtonian line on the gums
is, as a rule, indicative of lead absorption, and not of lead poisoning.
As a danger signal its value is immense, and hardly less so its value
in clinching diagnosis in doubtful cases. Whenever the line is seen
risk is imminent, and poisoning (not necessarily of the individual in
whom it is pronounced) among the workers is inevitable in the
absence of adoption of precautions. Unfortunately, careful dental
toilet, which the surgeon will necessarily lay stress on, may prevent
development, or the practice, when adopted, cause disappearance
of the line after the lapse of a few months. Under these
circumstances, the merest trace will have all the significance of the
fully-developed line in a worker neglectful of care of the teeth.
Among new workers a commencing blue line should be strong
evidence of the need for dust removal at some point in the process
of manufacture. The line, in our experience, is dense in occupations
giving rise to fumes or to dust of compounds of lead, but
comparatively rare in those handling metallic lead or its alloys, as
compositors, tea-lead rollers, solderers, and the like.
Some degree of pallor is so commonly met with in adolescence
that it is the progressive development of the anæmia which the
surgeon must especially watch for. As a danger signal, therefore, it
has the same significance nearly as the blue line; but when lead
absorption has affected the elements in the blood, progressive
anæmia in new workers, attributable to the employment, and
showing no tendency to improve after watching for a few months, is
an indication for suspension or transference to other work. In older
workers, with a duration of employment of five years or more, there
may be a quasi-pathognomonic pallor which does not vary from year
to year. In them it must be supposed that an equilibrium has been
established, and development of other symptoms, such as tremor,
wrist weakness, or albuminuria, becomes significant. Attention has
already been directed to the distinct saturnine facies associated with
anæmia, and characterized by loss of fat, particularly noticeable in
the orbit and buccinator region of the face. “So far as the question of
any worker’s suspension is concerned,” says Dr. King Alcock, “I
prefer to make my instinctive primâ facie distrust of a saturnine pallor
the basis for action. The pallor of plumbism cannot be summed up in
hæmoglobin and corpuscular content; it is the expression of a
complex toxæmia resulting from defective assimilation and
excretion”[3].
The knowledge the surgeon should gain of the idiosyncrasies of
the workers by his periodical examination will enable him to appraise
at their proper value the nature and degree of the symptoms in
notified cases.
Sometimes a rule is made that no lead-worker who has suffered
from an attack of plumbism should be allowed to resume work. This
we consider too harsh a measure. It may be true for painters, but
when remedial measures, such as locally applied exhaust
ventilation, can be applied, with consequent removal of the danger in
the process at which the poisoning has arisen, prohibition of
employment seems an unnecessarily drastic measure.
The health register in general use where periodic medical
examination is required in pursuance of special rules and regulations
is divided into two parts, in each of which entries by the surgeon are
required at each visit.
Part I.

List of Persons Employed in Processes. Particulars of Examina

First Employed
Worker’s Name, in such Process. Date Date Date
No. in full. Process. Age. Date. Result. Result. Result.
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8)
 Part II.

Particulars of any Directions

given by the Surgeon.
Reference to Any Certificate of Suspension
Part 1. Date of Number of or Certificate permitting
Examina- Persons Resumption of Work Signa
Page. Col. tion. Examined. must be entered here in full. of Surg
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)

In Part I. of the register the surgeon should, at the times of

examination, enter the date at the head of one of the columns
numbered 6 to 9; and in the space below, opposite the name of each
person examined on that date, a brief note (see next page) of the
condition found.
In Part II. he should again enter, in Column 3, the date of
examination, with a statement of the total numbers examined on that
occasion (Column 4); and in Column 5 any certificate of suspension
from work, or certificate permitting resumption of work, and
particulars of any other direction given by him, appending his
signature in Column 6.
It is the duty of the occupier to enter in Part I. the following
particulars with regard to each person examined: (1) Name in full
(Column 2); (2) the process in which he or she is employed (Column
3); (3) age when first employed (Column 4); and (4) date of first
employment in that process (Column 5); and these particulars, in