Marketing guru Elliott Ettenberg has taken a close look inside scores of businesses, from traditional retail and manufacturing companies to sleek new dot-coms. What he has seen is an emerging trend that has many corporate strategists running scared. When baby boomers retire, the biggest spenders in history will dramatically cut back on spending, forcing retailers to duke it out that much harder for their shares of rapidly dwindling markets.

To survive this dramatic power shift, businesses must adopt a new marketing paradigm based not on merely satisfying the customer, but delighting the customer.

In "The Next Economy, Ettenberg provides readers with just such a model and a set of powerful strategies that companies can use today to prepare themselves to thrive in the years ahead. With the help of many in-depth case studies, he schools readers in cutting-edge psychographic methods for identifying market segments in an economy driven by customer wants, rather than needs. He explains how to distinguish consumers from customers and describes proven techniques for forging long-term, highly profitable relationships with core customers. And he educates readers in the all-important "Four R's"--Relationships, Retrenchment, Relevancy, and Reward--powerful tools that can save any company.