Melissa Parrish

We guide B2C digital leaders toward new horizons of success with Forrester Decisions for Digital Business & Strategy. Learn how.

At CX North America on June 7-9, we’re going to help customer experience professionals, B2C marketers, and digital business leaders embrace new risks, develop bold customer strategies, and execute faster than you ever thought possible.

This Wednesday, July 15th, we’re inviting executives from all companies — large and small, B2B, and B2C — to participate in our inaugural CX Reality Day.

It’s Time To Treat The Discipline Of Software With Respect This isn’t another dig into an already told story about Iowa’s failed app. By now, everyone knows that the app — designed to collect caucus numbers in Iowa — bombed brutally (it ruined the nights of 1,600 caucus managers and countless others). Our insight: We must better embrace the challenges and importance of software with structures that […]

The Q4 2019 earnings reports are in for Facebook, Snap Inc., and Twitter. Here are our top takeaways for marketers: Facebook, Inc. Last year, we at Forrester argued that despite the number and extremity of Facebook’s scandals, they wouldn’t doom the company in the short term. So far, that’s held up, as the user base […]

When CX and marketing work together, they accomplish amazing things. Discover why the time is bring these groups together in this Q&A.

In their embrace of new tools and tactics, marketers have at times lost sight of the people they aim to connect with. It's time to take a step back and revisit core assumptions.

When marketers fail to understand the complexity and nuance of how customers’ core characteristics evolve, people lose trust in them. As they look elsewhere, customers have found a more nimble set of businesses to meet their needs: direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands.

The feedback on Consumer Marketing 2019 is rolling in: Attendees loved our focus on the direct-to-consumer (DTC) challenger brand trend, why consumers are responding so positively, and how traditional brands can learn from these up-and-comers. In fact, the audience was so engaged with the content and speakers that questions kept coming in long after the […]

Warby Parker. Everlane. Casper. MVMT. Bombas. Harry’s. The list of these digitally native, direct-to-consumer (DTC) challenger brands goes on and on — and incumbent consumer brands have taken notice almost as quickly as consumers themselves have turned to these up-and-comers for the products and services they need. But questions abound about what’s driving the increased supply […]

One of the positive consequences of having fantastic speakers and robust conversations at Consumer Marketing this year is that we have a backlog of questions from the audience that we weren’t able to address on stage. Here are just a few of the remaining questions that fellow marketers had for Jenny Storms, CMO of NBC […]

To my astonishment, this tweet, which quotes my opening remarks, was the most retweeted/liked/shared of Forrester’s Consumer Marketing 2018: On average, marketers are using 16 different channels to reach and interact with customers and, on average, are tracking 17 different types of measurements and KPIs, says @MelissaRParrish #FORRMktg — Ginger Conlon (@customeralchemy) I was astonished […]

One of the guests I’ll be welcoming at Consumer Marketing 2018 in April is Jennifer Storms, CMO of NBC Sports Group. The other day, we were chatting about how much more complicated marketing for the Olympics is than most of us would expect. Here are a few things I was particularly struck by: “The Olympics” […]

Last year marketers faced a crisis of confidence: How would you navigate the chaotic seas of our world and business context, rocked by politics and consumer upheavals you couldn’t control? This year, as businesses found their values-driven groove, marketers are facing major volume challenges: You’re responsible for—or are trying to dig up– more channels, more […]

The sky is falling, right on top of Snap Inc, and the sky’s name is CPM. Since they launched their self-service, auction-based buying environment, CPMs plunged 60%.  60%!?!?!?  Cue the panic, right? Not so fast. With companies like Facebook making up the competitive set, the pressure was always on Snap to not just post good […]

As we covered in our recent webinar, the convergence of advertising technology and marketing technology is inevitable — and that’s a good thing for marketers. The union of these two tech worlds is part of an emerging broader marketing mindset shift that focuses on quality rather than scale. Today’s customers demand experiences that are engaging […]

For marketers, the struggle is real: you want to provide your customers and prospects cohesive cross-channel experiences that demonstrate you actually know them (without freaking them out) — all while reducing the number of vendors in your tech stack. There are positive signs with the marketing technology ecosystem rapidly consolidating — and millions of dollars […]

In 2016, we learned a lot about how complicated it is to gather and interpret data that will help brands uncover people's motivations, interests and behaviors. At Consumer Marketing in NYC next month, we'll be taking these topics head-on, trying to understand how far data can go to helping us understand and target the right […]

What a strange time it is to be a marketer. Last year, we on the B2C marketing team fielded hundreds of questions from brands and tech partners alike about the revelations that rocked our worlds: kickbacks, tech consolidation, opacity of even decades-old partnerships, measurement screw-ups from the world’s second largest digital advertising player, and the […]