Don Peppers


Don Peppers is a customer experience authority, keynote speaker, American business author and a founding partner of Peppers & Rogers Group, a customer-centric management consulting firm.
In 2013, Peppers was inducted into the Data & Marketing Association Hall of Fame, along with Seth Godin and Martha Rogers, and in 2015, SatMetrix ranked him as the "world's most authoritative expert on customer experience."

Biography

Peppers grew up in a small town in Missouri, and attended the US Air Force Academy where he earned a B.S. in astronautical engineering. He ran on the varsity cross country team, captained the Academy's speech and debate team, and graduated first overall and academically in a class of 720. He won a fellowship to attend Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School, earning a Master's in Public Affairs.
After serving as an Air Force intelligence officer, he joined American Independent Oil Company as an economist in the oil industry. He then served as the director of accounting for Texas International Airlines, a regional airline. In the early 1980s, Peppers began working as a business development executive in the advertising world and, in 1988, was named to the first "Forty Under Forty" list published by Crain's New York Business. In 1990, he became CEO of Perkins/Butler Direct Marketing, a division of Chiat/Day. His 1995 book Life’s a Pitch: Then You Buy chronicles his experiences as a celebrated new-business rainmaker in the advertising industry. Peppers left Chiat Day in 1991 to found his own company, marketing 1:1 Inc., which later became Peppers & Rogers Group.
Peppers is a competitive runner and a married father of five.

Work

In the past 20 years, Peppers has presented speeches and executive workshops in more than 60 countries around the world, focusing on maintaining a competitive edge while dealing with modern business issues in the marketplaces. The Times of London has listed Peppers among their “Top 50 Business Brains,” and Accenture has included him in its global list of the “Top 50 Business Intellectuals.”
In 2016, Peppers and Rogers founded CX Speakers. CX Speakers trains B2B and B2C companies.

Writings

Since 1993, Peppers has authored or co-authored, with Martha Rogers, Ph.D., a total of ten business books, along with three editions of a graduate school textbook on customer-centric competition. Collectively, these books sold over a million copies in 18 languages. Some say that Peppers and Rogers are credited with having launched the CRM revolution with their first book, The One to One Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time. Inc. Magazine managing editor George Gendron called this book “one of the two or three most important business books ever written,” while Business Week called it the “bible of the new marketing.”
In 2016, Peppers and Rogers released the third edition of the graduate school textbook, Managing Customer Experience and Relationships: A Strategic Framework as well as the revised paperback edition of their book Extreme Trust: Turning Proactive Honesty and Flawless Execution into Long-Term Profits.
Peppers writes frequently for LinkedIn and was a blogger for Fastcompany.com.
Books by Don Peppers