Peppers and Rogers (1993), in The One to One Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time, argued that some customers were more valuable than others, and that all customers should be individually marketed to, and that share of wallet was more important than market share. This meant differentiating customers, not products, and selling multiple products to the same customer over the customer’s life. Their argument was based, in part, on media-tech changes that would alter the work and advertising consumption habits of customers. Seth Godin (1999), in Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends, and Friends into Customers, followed suit, recognizing that the old ad platform, television, had now multiplied like mosquitoes on a humid summer night in Minnesota, for the Web had created “[millions of] TV networks instead of ten” (p. 145). It might seem counter-intuitive at first, marketing to the new hatch 1:1, but getting their attention, Godin argued, means first getting their permission, and permissions are only granted one at a time.
One of the changes Peppers and Rogers imagined was a work-from-home, flex-hour (over a 7×24 work-week), consumer whose purchasing habits would be revealed and predicted over time via Web host systems. This is why the individual information Facebook most covets is a real name and a real date of birth. What Peppers and Rogers did not predict in the heady start to the Roaring 90’s was a stay-at-home work force at home because it was unemployed (see September, 2011 The Atlantic magazine’s “Can The Middle Class Be Saved?”, taken from Don Peck’s new book PINCHED: How the Great Recession Has Narrowed Our Futures and What We Can Do About It, to be published tomorrow).
Peck sees what Congress apparently cannot, that control of the future is about getting permission today, and that permission requires a one to one lifetime marketing commitment. This is why S&P’s David Beers in a video interview this morning with Reuters strongly suggests that a necessary step toward solving the US debt crisis is ending the Bush tax-cuts for upper income citizens. And to accomplish that task, Congress should start contacting their most valuable customers one to one and getting their permission (and we might point out what should be obvious but apparently is not to Congress, that their most important customers are not members of the so-called Tea Party, whose behavior mimes characters in Alice’s Wonderland).
The coup d’état is not a military coup, but a market coup. The market, led by S&P’s downgrade, has usurped Congress in taking action to solve the debt crisis and save the middle class. As Beers says in his interview “…get some buy in” to spending and revenue decisions. In spite of the anti-S&P sentiment, largely the result of misunderstanding of the rating agency’s scoring system, the S&P decision (and in spite of their lack of credibility resulting from their pre-crash decisions), should lead to repeal of the Bush tax-cuts, and that’s good news for the middle class, which in turn should be good news for the market.
The Coming of the Toads 
Your analysis and summary tends to downplay and to perhaps disregard , internal conflicts in what the media might call ” volatile” markets that affect outcomes usually attributed to ” consumers ” but which economists in their private studies whine about and regard as markers , economic markers , which are rogue and rampant even in the twisted conceptual intrigues of politicians who , it must be admitted , set policy . Is your market this or is your market that ? Only , it has been said , the little piggy who went to market knows .
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I meant the market where the middle class’s IRAs are sitting – like iceplant on a sand dune. Marx included students and teachers as part of the proletariat, by the way, not the middle class. My point was simply that the downgrade may force Congress to act responsibly, something it’s not been doing. As for economists knowing anything, Nobel prize winning economist Gary Becker admits “…I do not know why average degree of happiness has not risen in recent decades in the US as incomes rose” (see his 1-10-2010 post here: http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2010/01/happiness-and-wellbeing–becker.html ). And just today Jonah Lehrer (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/08/are-your-co-workers-killing-you/ ) talks about a study indicating office conditions and co-workers affect mortality rates: “The first thing the researchers discovered is that office conditions matter. A lot. In particular, the risk of death seemed to be correlated with the perceived niceness of co-workers, as less friendly colleagues were associated with a higher risk of dying. (What’s troubling is that such workplaces seem incredibly common.) While this correlation might not be surprising – friendly people help reduce stress, and stress is deadly – the magnitude of the “friendly colleague effect” is a bit unsettling: people with little or no “peer social support” in the workplace were 2.4 times more likely to die during the study, especially if they began the study between the ages of 38 and 43. In contrast, the niceness of the boss had little impact on mortality.” So yeah, there are wheels within wheels; that goes without saying. But what’s a poor boy to do? BTW, are you still confident? Susan says you come up here. Lots of agreement on my point about the downgrade; here’s one: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2011/08/why-standard-poors-got-the-downgrade-right.html
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I think you are absolutely right in your thinking. But who knows what will ultimately happen ?
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Did I accidentally leave a trillion dollars at your place when I was there last ? I seem to be missing a few trillion.
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I’ll look around, but I don’t think so. Oh, wait, you mean a trillion empties? I cashed those in already.
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