Ryan Skinner

Like fading celebrities, brand owners fear one thing most of all: irrelevance. “I think my mom/dad/grandma/grandpa uses them.” The horror. Edgewell Personal Care’s most recent annual report is all about that horror. In so many words, it acknowledges that its primary men’s grooming brands — Schick and Wilkinson Sword razors, among others — are grandpa […]

“The Forrester Wave™: Content Marketing Platforms for B2C Marketers, Q2 2019” is live! In this year’s 30-criteria evaluation, we assessed and scored the nine most significant vendors: Bloomreach, Contently, NewsCred, Opal, Percolate, ScribbleLive, Sitecore, Skyword, and Sprinklr. We looked at their current offering, their strategy, and current market presence. The report shows how each provider […]

Direct-to-consumer brands (DTC) are making a splash — for example, Glossier and Rent the Runway just reached unicorn status (a valuation of $1 billion or more) last week. What does this mean for incumbent brands? We’ll be unpacking the DTC trend and its repercussions next week at Forrester’s Consumer Marketing 2019 Forum in New York […]

Zoom back 10 or even five years ago, and consumers would tell Forrester, “Yes, I use digital channels, but more often than not, I discover, research, or purchase a product offline.” You saw that product on TV, or when looking at a supermarket shelf, or talking to a friend. And imagine buying a sofa online […]

This blog post is part of Forrester’s Holiday 2018 retail series. It’s late October, which means one thing as a consumer: You’re going to start hearing Nat King Cole, Brenda Lee, and Bing Crosby a lot more whenever you’re shopping. For most marketers, it just means: Whatever you were going to do for Xmas, it’s already […]

What bubble? The size of the influencer market on Instagram alone is set to grow $2.38 billion next year. Accordingly, our Forrester Analytics data shows that 75% of marketers have already implemented or are planning to implement a solution to manage this market in 2018, and seventeen percent of B2C marketers consider influencers one of […]

People are pragmatic, and they predictably think they’re rational — which is great. It’s been reported pretty extensively that the Russian government interfered in the last US presidential election. It’s not a stretch to say that most Trump voters would acknowledge Russian interference as a fact. It’s also unlikely any of them would acknowledge that Russian […]

People are pragmatic, and they predictably think they’re rational — which is great. It’s been reported pretty extensively that the Russian government interfered in the last US presidential election. It’s not a stretch to say that most Trump voters would acknowledge Russian interference as a fact. It’s also unlikely any of them would acknowledge that Russian […]

We’ve officially retired our content marketing playbook. We’re still doing research on content and content strategy, but — as we said about two years ago — the utility of talking about “content marketing” just isn’t there anymore.

Sometimes you hit a nerve as an analyst. Sometimes everyone you talk to about an issue says, “Hey, that’s exactly what we’re focusing on right now! It’s a big deal for us — yeah, right now!” Nick Barber and I had that experience over the last several months. The issue: How far along are you on […]

Sometimes you hit a nerve as an analyst. Sometimes everyone you talk to about an issue says, “Hey, that’s exactly what we’re focusing on right now! It’s a big deal for us — yeah, right now!” Nick Barber and I had that experience over the last several months. The issue: How far along are you on […]

If there’s any industry whose content should inspire trust, it’s that of the investment and wealth management industry. They’re asking consumers to entrust their nest eggs with them. And there are lots of eggs. PwC forecast that the mass affluent segment alone would put up to $10 trillion under management by 2020. Our analysis of […]

Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) is a big deal, and particularly in online clothing retail, where free delivery and returns means retailers may spend more on their worst customers’ postage than those customers spend on stuff. Last year, ASOS – the UK-based retailer – announced a potentially significant improvement in how it calculates and applies CLTV […]

MIT Media Labs may have helped put a fork in the monolithic approach to branding in 2011. Today great brands are less recognizable by a particular color palette than by a tonal, or spiritual, or conceptual ‘je ne sais quoi’ that breathes through everything it does. You know it’s Patagonia without seeing the logo. Or […]

In April 2017, I completed a Wave report on content marketing platforms (CMPs) – specifically, Contently, Kapost, NewsCred, Opal, Percolate, ScribbleLive, Skyword, Spredfast, and Sprinklr – for B2C marketers. B2B marketers asked: What about us? Which platform suits B2B content marketing best? The same ones that suit B2C content marketing? What makes them different? Will […]

I’ve always been drawn to small. I suspect it’s because I started out small. Not in the “all-babies-start-out-small-duh-forrester-analyst” way, but in the “this-kid-is-undersized-for-his-age-what’s-wrong-with-him” way. A late growth spurt made all that go away, but it left me with a lingering fondness for smallness. Small can be good. But is small, good, in marketing? The activist […]

The Whole Foods acquisition by Amazon weeks ago was only the latest milepost in the latter’s inexorable march to the top of retail. The company sold $136 billion worth of products in 2016 – more than any other online retailer (and just over a third of what Wal-Mart did). And we find that Amazon is big and gaining […]

Today Cision will officially IPO on the NYSE, assuming the ticker CISN and emerging as a tradable entity from the shadow of its private equity owners. The underlying intent: To raise capital to continue a growth trajectory that’s involved a string of acquisitions in the PR and comms space, such as Gorkana, Viralheat, and PRNewsWire. […]

Ted Schadler first said “content is the soul of digital.” To that, I add: “…and content marketing platforms are its church.” CMPs. This tech is like the ace up the sleeve for savvy marketing leaders. A marketing leader at Airbnb told us that this is the crucial tech that allows the company to move faster […]