1:1 Marketing: An Interview with Don Peppers, Marketing Oracle and CX Expert

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In 1993, AT&T launched a marketing campaign called “You Will”. In a series of memorable TV ads, it depicted future applications of technology that turned out to be eerily accurate. Each commercial showcased a different product innovation AT&T had been working on. “Have you ever had an assistant who lived in your Computer?”, one commercial asks. Another begins by wondering, “Have you ever gotten a phone call on your wrist?”. Each commercial ended with the signoff: “You will”. Almost all the scenarios, from videoconferencing to self-service kiosks to video on demand, eventually came true (just not attributable to AT&T, the one prediction it fumbled).

It was a time of technological optimism when the interactive future seemed excitingly close. That year the World Wide Web had become freely available to the public at large. Services like Prodigy and Compuserve were already offering online subscribers dial-up access to a broad range of networked services. U.S. Vice President Al Gore earned notoriety heralding the “information superhighway”. And the launch of the Mosaic browser ignited the digitization of commerce.

This revolution in communications technology gave hope to marketers agonizing over the decline of mass media. And that year they found inspiration in a book called “The One to One Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time” written by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers. Just like the AT&T campaign, the book imagined what the near future might look like due to rapid technological change, specifically the rise of individually addressable media. Intended as a “guidebook for competing in the 1:1 future”, the book argued that marketing would need to “put customers first” to succeed and that would only be possible by building “the deepest, most trusting relationships” with customers.

A giant best-seller at the time, the book made “one-to-one” marketing the buzzword of the decade. Soon after, Peppers and Rogers parlayed their fame into a major consultancy business. Their names became synonymous with the rise of interactive marketing. Today, a quarter century later, the future has finally caught up with many of their predictions.

Peppers and Rogers belong to the pantheon of visionary marketers who laid the groundwork for the widespread adoption of relationship marketing principles and practices. Don Peppers remains an ardent proponent of putting customers first, continuing to address marketing audiences everywhere on its importance. Notwithstanding the immense strides made in technology, Peppers says that improving the customer experience “represents an immense problem to solve” for most businesses. And while many of his original ideas have become mainstream, Peppers recognizes that many businesses are still struggling to fully catch up to the one-to-one future he envisioned a quarter century ago. We started by asking if he and Martha had taken time to celebrate the 25th publishing anniversary of the book.