Martha Rogers, one of the world’s leading authorities on customer-focused business strategies, received the 2017 Donald G. Hileman Alumni Award from UT’s College of Communication and Information at the college’s awards and scholarship donor appreciation banquet on October 13.
Rogers received her doctorate in communications in 1983. She is a best-selling author and co-founder of Peppers and Rogers Group. Her latest endeavor is the formation of CX Speakers, which delivers workshops, keynote presentations, and thought leadership consulting focused on customer experience topics. In 2015, Rogers founded Trustability Metrix, designed to help companies understand how they are trusted by customers, employees, and business peers.
Rogers’s counsel and insight are regularly sought by Fortune 500 and Blue Chip executives who are trying to crack the code on customer measurement and value, business strategy, trust, corporate culture, innovation, and the effect of emerging technologies. In 2015, Rogers and her business partner, Don Peppers, topped Satmetrix’s top 25 list of the most influential customer experience leaders. Business 2.0 magazine named her one of the 19 most important business gurus of the past century, and the World Technology Network cited her as “an innovator most likely to create visionary ripple effects.”

Rogers and Peppers have co-produced a legacy of international bestsellers that have collectively sold more than a million copies in 18 languages.
Their first book, The One to One Future, was called by Inc. Magazine’s editor in chief “one of the two or three most important business books ever written,” while Business Week said it was the “bible of the customer strategy revolution.” Their ninth book, Extreme Trust: Turning Proactive Honesty and Flawless Execution into Long-Term Profits, was named to LinkedIn’s 2017 summer reading list. And the third edition of their graduate school textbook Managing Customer Experience and Relationships: A Strategic Perspective is the definitive textbook in the field. It has been cited more than 10,000 times and serves as a reference book for practitioners.
Rogers began her career as a copywriter and advertising executive. In academia, she has most recently served as an adjunct professor at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, where she co-directed the Teradata Center for Customer Strategy.
Rogers has been widely published in academic and trade journals, including Harvard Business Review, Journal of Advertising Research, Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, and Journal of Applied Psychology. She has been named International Sales and Marketing Executives’ Educator of the Year. She has blogged for Huffington Post and elsewhere. She lives in New York City with her husband, Emmy-Award winning talk show host Dick Cavett.
“Martha Rogers’s achievements illustrate to our graduate students all that they can achieve in their future,” said College of Communication and Information Dean Mike Wirth. “She embodies the entrepreneurial spirit of creativity with the rigors of academic research to produce valuable and insightful material to her classes and her audiences. We are proud to have presented her with the 2017 Hileman Award in acknowledgement of her accomplishments.”
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CONTACT:
Donna Silvey (dsilvey@utk.edu, 865-974-6727)