Don Peppers

Death by WOM

Box office receipts for the movie Bruno fell 40% just 24 hours after its release, as first-day viewers texted and tweeted it into oblivion. While 14% of consumers say they trust advertisements, 78% trust their peers. Today, your brand’s first impression will likely be conveyed by Twitter, Facebook, or Google. The social media revolution may be even more disruptive to business models than the Internet itself has been, requiring nothing short of a complete re-wiring of most corporate marketing strategies and even mission statements.

Want to know the future of marketing and customer service? Look at how Gen Y and Gen Z consumers are employing social media to navigate their lives. They prefer Facebook and MySpace to email (this year Boston College even stopped distributing email addresses to new freshmen). And with social media’s emphasis on transparency, younger consumers now consider privacy protection to be a virtual non-issue. After all, why would anyone ever do business with a company they can’t trust?

In this visionary keynote, Don Peppers offers best-practice recommendations as to how your company can create superior marketing programs and deliver the kinds of customer experiences that build strong customer relationships. Attendees will learn:

• How customers are using social media and the implications for businesses
• Best practices for using social media channels to build deeper customer relationships
• Recession-proofing your marketing in a Web 2.0 world
• How “sentiment analysis” can make sense of unstructured voice-of-the-customer data generated in social media channels
• Tips and tactics for building a customer-focused organization that engages customers as well as employees, and creates brand advocates.
   

About Don Peppers

Recognized for over a decade as one of the leading authorities on customer-focused relationship management strategies for business, Don Peppers is an acclaimed author and a founding partner of Peppers & Rogers Group, the world's premier customer-centered management consulting firm that provides clients with world-class customer strategy, flawlessly executed, for bottom-line impact

Don's vision, perspective and thoughtful analysis of global business practices has earned him some significant citations by internationally recognized entities. The Times of London has cited him among their "Top 50 Business Brains" in 2005, noting that he climbed 10 spaces from their 2003 assessment. Similarly, the United Kingdom's premier marketing organization, the Chartered Institute for Marketing, cited Don among their inaugural listing of the 50 "most influential thinkers in marketing and business today." He has been ranked by Accenture's Institute for Strategic Change among the global "Top 100 Business Intellectuals" for two years running. Business 2.0 Magazine has named him one of the "foremost business gurus of our times," and the World Technology Network has cited Don as an "innovator most likely to create visionary 'ripple effects'." Inc. Magazine cited Peppers & Rogers Group as an annual Web Awards winner for the innovative way the firm uses the Internet to leverage their collective expertise to service clients.

Don's expertise and clear, concise way of thinking places him in high demand as both a speaker and a management advisor with Fortune 500 executives and entrepreneurs seeking to identify their most valuable customers, increase customer satisfaction, and improve ROI and ROC.

Peppers' and Rogers' most innovative strategic thinking is embodied in their newest book, Rules to Break & Laws to Follow Their 2005 publication of Return On Customer^sm (or ROC) advanced the concepts and tenets of business valuation to the next evolutionary stage, documenting the customer base as a revenue-producing asset for businesses, capable of driving a company's long-term economic worth. It climbed to the top 20 business books on Amazon, and was a top-ten business best-seller for 2005 with 800-CEO-Read. Fast Company named the book one of the 15 "most important reads" of 2005, and cited the book again in 2007 on their list of the 25 "Best Books" in business. Return On Customer^sm was also a finalist in the American Marketing Association Foundation's Berry-AMA Book Prize for 2006, for innovation and worldwide contribution to the professional field.

Don is a popular voice among editors and the media, both online and in print, and is the co-author, with Martha Rogers, Ph.D., of a series of international best sellers that have collectively sold over a million copies in 17 languages. The One to One Future (1993) was named by Inc. Magazine's editor, George Gendron as "one of the two or three most important business books of all time," and is considered by many as the bible of the CRM revolution. Enterprise One to One (1997), which received a five-star rating from The Wall Street Journal, shows how CRM strategies and interactive marketing should be applied differently in different business situations. The One to One Fieldbook (1999), is a step-by-step guide to the mechanics of Peppers and Rogers Group's unique methodology for building customer relationships. The One to One Manager (1999) highlights the pioneers who dared to implement one-to-one strategies. One to One B2B: Customer Development Strategies for the Business-to-Business World (2001) made The New York Times Best Seller list within a month of publication, and provides detailed case studies on five major corporations that embraced a vision for the B2B customer relationship. The authors have also published the first-ever CRM textbook for university use in graduate level courses, Managing Customer Relationships (April 2004).

Don Peppers is also the author of Life's a Pitch -- Then You Buy, based on his career as a new business rainmaker for world-class advertising agencies, including Chiat/Day and Lintas:USA. He capped his advertising career as the CEO of Perkins/Butler Direct Marketing, a top-20 U.S.-direct-marketing agency.

Prior to marketing and advertising, he worked as an economist in the oil business and as the director of accounting for a regional airline. Don holds a Bachelor's Degree in astronautical engineering from the U.S. Air Force Academy, and a Master's Degree in public affairs from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School.