The Debt Diet: An Easy-to-follow Plan To Shed Debt And Trim Spending

By Ellie Kay

Book Overview

In their efforts to become more customer-focused, companies everywhere find themselves entangled in outmoded systems, metrics, and strategies rooted in their product-centered view of the world. Now, to ease this shift to a customer focus, marketing strategy experts Roland T. Rust, Valarie A. Zeithaml, and Katherine N. Lemon have created a dynamic new model they call "Customer Equity," a strategic framework designed to maximize every firm's most important asset, the total lifetime value of its customer base.The authors' Customer Equity Framework yields powerful insights that will help any business increase the value of its customer base. Rust, Zeithaml, and Lemon introduce the three drivers of customer equity -- Value Equity, Brand Equity, and Retention Equity -- and explain in clear, nontechnical language how managers can base their strategies on one or a combination of these drivers. The authors demonstrate in this breakthrough book how managers can build and employ competitive metrics that reveal their company's Customer Equity relative to their competitors. Based on these metrics, they show how managers can determine which drivers are most important in their industry, how they can make efficient strategic trade-offs between expenditures on these drivers, and how to project a financial return from these expenditures. The final section devotes two chapters to the Customer Pyramid, an approach that segments customers based on their long-term profitability, and an especially important chapter examines the Internet as the ultimate Customer Equity tool. Here the authors show how companies such as Intuit.com, Schwab.com, and Priceline.com have used more than one or all three drivers to increase Customer Equity.In this age of one-to-one marketing, understanding how to drive Customer Equity is central to the success of any firm. In particular,Driving Customer Equitywill be essential reading for any marketing manager and, for that matter, any manager concerned with growing the value of the firm's customer base.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0764200011
• ISBN13: 9780764200014
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: Bethany House Pub
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.5" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Losing unwanted lbs (and unwanted high interest rates)

This is an unusual book. Although I read it front-to-back, I've paged back to specific sections to share with my debt-heavy friends, in which the author shows real, doable tactics for losing debt weight. (Also known as dead weight!?) She includes lots of resources (websites, phone numbers of helpful organizations), and suggestions on how to approach or best take advantage of their services. The sections on FICO scores was excellent--it explained details that go into caculating it, and why it is that I need to know this. Such as: my score could be decent (not terribly low), but still actually cost me real bucks in interest. Thanks, Ms. Kay!

The Debt Diet

How someone can keep me interested in a subject as mundane as finances, I do not know, but Ellie Kay does with humor, advice and outstanding anecdotes. She hits every subject imaginable, from insurance, children, teens, retirement, savings and sharing. She is like my personal financial trainer in print. :)

Rock solid advice from an expert

Ellie Kay offers very practical, proven advice on how to get a handle on family finances. Those of us who are financial sloths view Ellie Kay as a coach who who helps us get into fiscal shape. She is funny, encouraging, wise, and effective. Excellent resource.

Delicious - I couldn't eat just one chapter.....

I gobbled this book down, chapter by chapter. Ellie has written a very comprehensive guide. Not only are there easy to follow worksheets but she has the guts to delve into the "whys". The chapter about the "fight-free zone for couples" was so applicable. I was able to use her suggestions that very night. I wish I had this book when I first got married!

'Acvice With a Heart - From The Heart'

Excellent book with advice I would loved to have had access to many years ago. This book should be in every young couples home. Because tough facts and advice are woven together with a golden thread of humor which is Ellie Kay's spirit, this is a book which will benefit any age person or couple. In the past 43 years of raising a family of five sons, I thought I knew every way to manage finances, but "The Debt Diet" has shed a welcome light on many other ways to have financial freedom. I love the book and I didn't even have to give up 'CHOCOLATE' to follow Ellie's advice. Thanks, Ellie, for your friendship, advice, prayers, and love over the years.