It's an elegant piece of thought leadership. Peppers and Rogers have just service marked a new term: "Return on Customer." The point they are trying to make is that the value of a company's customer base should be watched as closely as any other financial indicator -- whether it's moving north or south.

"Without a handle on Return on Customer, companies frequently end up destroying a great deal of their own value in a single-minded quest for current income," write Don Peppers and Martha Rogers in 1to1 Magazine. "If managers actually tracked their ROC, they would have a whole new perspective on growing their company's value."

They explain that ROC can be measured mathematically: "ROC equals the sum of a firm's current-period profit from its customers, plus any changes in customer equity (the sum of the lifetime values of all current and future customers served by a firm), divided by the total customer equity at the beginning of the period."

As they see it, ROC is "a speedometer for organic growth, measuring the efficiency with which a firm can create genuine value...Tracking ROC allows a business to think about customers as the economic assets they really are, and to start making business decisions based not only on profit, but also on conserving and growing that asset."