Merlin Stone1 and Michael Starkey2
Correspondence: Merlin Stone, The Customer Framework, Lily Hill House, Lily Hill Road, Ascot RG12 2SJ, UK. E-mail:merlin.stone@thecustomerframework.com
1is Head of Research at The Customer Framework. He is author or co-author of many articles and 30 books on customer management. The UK's Chartered Institute of Marketing listed him in 2003 as one of the world's top 50 marketing thinkers, he was nominated as one of the 20 most influential people in the direct marketing industry in a Precision Marketing readership poll in 2003, while NOP World nominated him in 2004 as one of the 100 most influential individuals for their input and influence on the development and growth of e-commerce and the Internet in the United Kingdom over the previous 10 years. He is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and an Honorary Life Fellow of the UK's Institute of Direct Marketing. He is also on the editorial advisory boards of several academic journals. Parallel to his business career, he has also pursued a full academic career, holding senior posts at various universities. He started his career teaching economics at UMIST (now part of Manchester University), then moved to Kingston Polytechnic, also teaching economics. He then went into the engineering industry, before returning to Kingston to teach marketing and business strategy. Other significant academic posts included being a member of the senior staff at Henley Management College, Professor and then Dean at Kingston University (he was the Dean of Human Sciences, otherwise known as arts and social sciences when it became a university), and Professor at Surrey University and Bristol Business School. He is now a visiting professor at De Montfort, Portsmouth and Oxford Brookes Universities and an Associate Lecturer in Economics at the Open University.
2is a Principal Lecturer in Customer Relationship