B2C marketing

Marketers will run a portfolio of automation technologies; take an organized and intentional approach to this complex but crucial effort.

FTD Gets Caught In A Terrible Game Of Pickle Century-old floral delivery stalwart FTD filed for Chapter 11, sending shivers through C-suites of venerable brands everywhere. In a growing US flower market, this pioneer should have dominated. It’s long offered eCommerce and delivery, features that competitive direct-to-consumer (DTC) upstarts now play to disrupt markets. But […]

Marketing has changed forever. Will it cause the CMO role to disappear? Learn what the rise of the Chief Growth Officer could spell for CMOs.

China is expected to be the world’s largest consumer market in 2019. Foreign brands will continue to invest in China, but the golden age of easy growth for foreign brands is over. Seeking Chinese equivalents of Western marketing approaches no longer works. My latest report, “A Guide To Marketing Into China,” helps global marketers customize […]

To help retailers and brands plan for 2019, Claudia Tajima and I are interviewing experts within Forrester for our series, “Applying 2019 Predictions To Retail.” Recently, we spoke to Michele Goetz about how artificial intelligence will affect retailers in 2019. This week, Claudia interviewed Emily Collins, principal analyst on Forrester’s B2C marketing team and an expert in loyalty, on her contributions to the 2019 B2C marketing predictions […]

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 […]

Consumers seek out brands that share their values. At CX NYC, we’ll debut a values-based experience framework to help CX pros strategically approach this emerging area of differentiation. Get a sneak peek by reading our Q&A with Principal Analyst Rick Parrish.

I focus a lot of my research on marketing innovation and have been working on mobile (first as a marketing guy at a telco in 1998, then as an analyst) for more than 20 years. However, it is still fascinating to me to see how many marketers wrongly think their company has fixed mobile basics […]

In November 2018, we predicted that CMOs would target societal tensions to gain an advantage in competitive markets. Nike’s 30th-anniversary campaign featuring controversial activist Colin Kaepernick would serve as an opening salvo for other brands to just do it. And so they did. AdAge’s “Campaign of the Year” is producing a tapestry of evidence that CMOs […]

Crisis Management Is Changing  Boeing’s having a tough run. The company is under intense scrutiny after two crashes involving its 737 MAX jets, with governments grounding planes globally. This isn’t the first time Boeing planes have crashed — but PR-wise, it’s the worst. What’s different serves as caution for all leaders, regardless of industry. The […]

Let’s be honest: There is a lot of hype around voice assistants (or, as we call them at Forrester, intelligent agents, or IAs). Marketers, agencies, and vendors alike are all excited about this potential voice search future. But have you ever had a voice search experience with an IA like the cartoon below? We wanted […]

Our 2019 B2C Marketing predictions hone in on the impact of rising customer power. Forrester has been evangelizing the age of the customer for a decade, but the message is approaching a crescendo. This year, we called that consumer desire for better data control, better experiences (especially in social), and better connections to their values […]

Is There A Resurgence For The CIO Role? For years, the CIO role looked like it had been moving toward “chief infrastructure officer,” with many executives feeling like the transformative part of their job had been carved out and handed to chief digital officers. We have always been dubious that CDOs without deep technology expertise […]

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 […]

On April 4, IBM announced plans to sell its marketing technology (martech) assets to investment management firm Centerbridge Partners. Upon completion of the deal, likely midyear following the customary regulatory and closing requirements, Centerbridge will form a new, standalone company based around the former IBM tech. Current IBM Watson Marketing leadership and staff will continue […]

The last couple weeks have been an exciting time for the customer data platform (CDP) category. At long last, major marketing technology vendors formally declared their intentions to get serious about managing and activating data for marketing. For the CDP community, the entry of marketing clouds is a big deal, carrying equal parts excitement over […]

I’m excited to share that our evaluation of loyalty technology providers — “The Forrester Wave™: Loyalty Technology Platforms, Q2 2019” — is now live. In our 28-criterion evaluation, we identified the top 13 loyalty technology vendors — Aimia, Annex Cloud, Brierley+Partners, Cheetah Digital, Clutch, Collinson, Comarch, CrowdTwist, Epsilon, ICF Next, Kobie, Merkle/HelloWorld, and SessionM — […]

Apple first introduced Intelligent Tracking Protection (ITP) in 2017, but the latest update (2.1) creates a new set of challenges for advertisers, publishers, and tech vendors that make money from online behavioral advertising (OBA), attribution, web analytics, testing, and personalization. With new reports that Google may be following suit, we decided it was time to […]

More than 400 digitally native, direct-to-consumer (DTC) disruptor brands have burst on the scene — brands going beyond the online ordering offered by traditional catalog or eCommerce retailer models. They promise sleep, reimagined; oral care, like never before; sneakers, cool enough to wear to work; meal preparation, made easy; and all, delivered directly to you. […]