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Marketing 1 to 1, the Peppers and Rogers Group, is a six-year-old consulting business that just made Inc. magazine's top 500 list this year.
"This honor is very cool -- cool, in the sense that our focus was not on growth in the beginning. Instead our goal was to help companies face the new age of technology. Now, we realize that we have worked very hard have gotten here and that it is now time to grow," said Martha Rogers said.
Begun in 1992 by Don Peppers, the former director of a top-20 direct marketing agency, and Rogers, a professor of business, the duo initially collaborated on writing their first book: "The One To One Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time," published in 1993.
"Nine years ago, Don came to speak to the Ad Club of Toledo (Ohio) to talk to professionals and my students on how information technology would change the way corporations marketed their products and services.
"Afterwards, we talked and I told him he should write a book. When he said that he didn't have the time, I offered to write it for him, since I existed in 'a publish or perish world,'" Rogers recalled.
The two wrote the book, though they lived in two different time zones, by mailing diskettes to each other every day and talking by phone. Their business developed from this collaboration.
"The One to One Future" struck a resounding chord in corporate board rooms. The book has broken all records for a business book on the best selling lists. It is still selling and has been printed in 12 languages.
Rogers and Peppers hit the corporate lecture circuit, consulted to major corporations and companies, using the new marketing approach and continued to write more books.
In 1993, Bob Dorf, founder and former chief executive officer of Dorf & Stanton...