In a world where all products and services are becoming commodities, what increasingly defines a business today is its customers, who create all its value and, at the same time, are its scarcest resource. Don Peppers, a founding partner of the consultancy Peppers and Rogers, explained last month that we need to win a customer’s trust and to maximize a new metric that he calls “return on customer” and which can be regarded as “a speedometer of organic growth.”