The 21 articles in Relationship Marketing for Competitive Advantage are wide-ranging, covering manufacturing and services, business and consumer database marketing, and retail. All in all, they represent some of the best writing on relationship marketing including seminal works by marketing experts from around the world such as Theodore Levitt, Leonard Berry, David Maister and Christian Grönroos.

The fundamental principle upon which relationship marketing is founded is that the greater the level of customer satisfaction with the relationship with the supplier-not just the product or service-then the greater the likelihood that the customer will stay with the supplier. Retaining customers is important, as there is strong evidence to suggest that customer retention is directly related to profitability. It appears that the longer the customer stays with a supplier, the higher the likelihood that they will place a greater amount of business with the supplier, even to the extent of single sourcing. Further, there is a likelihood that these retained customers will cost less to service and that they will be less likely to be motivated solely by price.

At the heart of relationship marketing is the integration, company-wide, of hitherto separate customer service and total quality initiatives with the mainstream of marketing strategy. Conventionally, customer service and quality have been managed separately from marketing. In the relationship marketing paradigm, they are intertwined and managed as one. The rationale behind this is that it is upon service and quality that relationships are built.

Edited by academics from the Cranfield School of Management, the articles in this book are supplemented with summaries and commentaries, highlighting a broad scope of issues such as customer retention, employee satisfaction, supplier relations and the management of service quality. These issues are brought together to provide an integrated approach to the development of a relationship marketing strategy. This book of linked readings has been designed to reinforce themes first developed in Relationship Marketing by Christopher, Payne and Ballantyne (Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford, 1991) and provides a solid basis for the further development of relationship marketing as a discipline and as a practical orientation.

The articles in Relationship Marketing for Competitive Advantage are wide-ranging, covering manufacturing and services, business and consumer database marketing, and retail. They represent some of the best writing on the subject by experts from around the world.

Edited by academics from the Cranfield School of Management, these articles are supplemented with summaries and commentaries, highlighting a broad scope of issues such as customer retention, employee satisfaction, supplier relations and the management of service quality. These issues are brought together to provide an integrated approach to the development of a relationship marketing strategy. They have been designed to reinforce themes first developed in Relationship Marketing by Christopher, Payne and Ballantyne (Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford).

This is a great book to get get a background on the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950's and 60's. I read it when I began trying to learn about the CRM and some of the key players.

I think that this book is a valued companion to Taylor Branch's epic work "Parting the Waters". Together, they make an unbeatable pair of study aids for one of America's most turbulent periods.

While P.T.W. is a more dispassionate third person chronicle, E.O.T.P. is more personally driven. It brings to life individuals like Bayard Rustin, Stokley Carmichael, John Lewis and other giants (known and obscure) of the movement. Events from the Till lynching to the Attica riots as seen through the eyes of those on the scene (sometimes, those making the scene).

Fascinating reading.

Read the Microsoft documentation instead. This book is a thinly disguised rip-off of the Microsoft documentation padded with examples of dubious value. In 590 pages this book manages to add no value or information beyond the original documentation. That's quite an achievement.

If you want to learn ISAPI...think again. This was "hot" 2 years ago...now it is all but dead.

ISAPI's big promise was better performance and memory usage...ironic that it has now fallen in favor to the biggest performance pig of all web applications...ASP. In an age of fast machines and small web apps, rapid development and ease of use wins out over performance.

ISAPI is hard to learn, harder to get right, unstable, bug ridden (if written in MFC) and surprisingly inflexible.

Look, you're a smart person. You want to do the right thing. You don't need to subject yourself to the torture of learning ISAPI. Only hard-core programmers who are tasked with writing a custom web app that is going to get some VERY heavy traffic should even bother with ISAPI.

So why did I give this book 4 stars? There are no good ISAPI books out there. This one has the most information in it and will allow you the best chance to actually develop something that works. Get this book and hit Genusa's (now dusty) ISAPI site. Also spend a lot of time in the Microsoft knowledge base...there are plenty of workarounds and bugs to learn about too.

Keep in mind that with ISAPI you had better be a damn good programmer. If your DLL ever crashes...bye bye web server. This is harder than you think if you are doing "serious" web programming which includes database access.

Smart managers will not allow mission-critical web apps to be developed in ISAPI by a web punk who has never done this before. Do everyone a favor and get a clue. There is a reason why nobody is doing this stuff anymore!

Game over. Go home and don't look back. Go off and learn ASP and Cold Fusion like a good little web programmer. You will have a marketable skill and will actually get things done.

ISAPI is Microsoft's approach to adding capabilities to web serving. There are only a few books that describe how to use ISAPI. This book is the best of them, because the author: 1) provides examples in both C and C++, and 2) compares ISAPI with CGI solutions. Unfortunately, ISAPI is a complicated subject, so more and shorter examples would help elucidate the reader.