(FORTUNE Magazine) – Next time you're standing in line at the grocery store with a full cart of groceries, wistfully watching somebody with a tomato whisk through the express line, know this: Consultant Seth Godin is on your side. "Have you noticed that supermarkets do exactly the wrong thing?" he asks. "What if you reversed it? What if you bent over backward to treat your very best customers dramatically better than everyone else?"

The italics are his, and so are the insights. Godin is one of those gurus you'd love to discount because he seems so cocky--but it's hard because he's so rarely wrong. In Free Prize Inside! (Portfolio, $19.95), he expands on his earlier (okay, brilliant) work, Permission Marketing. Says Godin: "If an ad agency came to you and said, Well, here we have this nice, safe, middle-of-the-road advertising that's pretty much like everyone else's, would you accept that? Of course not. So why do you accept it in customer service?" Good question. The "free prize" in Godin's title is "the experience worth talking about," and hey, not in a bad way. I have a deep-down feeling that if your company's customers could recommend one book to you, this would be it. --Anne Fisher