B2C marketing

Singles’ Day, the world’s largest online shopping festival, is celebrating its 10th anniversary. There’s no doubt that we will see another record-smashing year, although gross merchandise volume (GMV) will no longer be the highlight. Singles’ Day has always been Alibaba’s testbed for new business models and technologies, and this year is no exception. AI and […]

Like the opening sequence of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, the social media landscape is getting “flipped-turned upside down” by the ascendance of stories. Well, that may be a bit dramatic, but they are certainly starting to make waves. Stories are growing in popularity as a mode of sharing and consuming content on social media. […]

“I get knocked down, but I get up again.” — Chumbawamba   Halfway through the 20-year-long age of the customer, empowered consumers are more informed about their purchases, demand data privacy, and dictate the experiences that they want. Brands have been beaten down with every misstep, many of which snowballed into broad PR crises: United Airlines, Wells Fargo, Starbucks, […]

I am excited to announce the publication of “The Forrester Wave™: Marketing Measurement And Optimization Solutions In Asia Pacific, Q4 2018.” In our first 36-criteria evaluation of marketing measurement and optimization solutions in Asia Pacific (AP), we identified the seven most significant vendors — Analytic Partners, Data2Decisions, Datalicious, Fractal Analytics, Impact, Neustar, and Nielsen — […]

This blog post is part of Forrester’s Holiday 2018 retail series. Today’s consumer expects advertisers to deliver personalized, relevant experiences and rewards those that do. Kiran Mani, Google’s managing director of retail, speaking at the National Retail Federation’s September 2018 conference, said that 33% of consumers expect personalized recommendations.[i] Retailers intent on delivering such recommendations […]

For the past 30-plus years, and for a host of reasons, the age-old connection between creative and media has been severed. In the programmatic era, the focus has been dominantly on media, as though creative didn’t contribute to enticing consumer attention and engagement and driving media performance. The results have been dismal: The digital advertising […]

Customer experience (CX) was at the forefront of CMOs’ minds in 2018. They shifted ad budgets (under siege thanks to trust and transparency issues) to even more technology and CX initiatives. Good news: The focus is creating more emotionally resonant and useful brand experiences such as Disney’s MagicBand. Bad news: The competitive advantage these experiences […]

Maturing Into A Horizontal Channel Management Platform Aligned With CRM and Marketing Automation Channel and alliance leaders are known to be good jugglers. With the average partner program containing over 90 distinct components, encouraging channel growth while mediating conflict is a complex undertaking. Partner relationship management (PRM) connects the dots between partner planning, recruitment, onboarding, […]

Forrester’s customer experience Forums are in their 10th year — from our first one in 2009 in New York, they’ve grown and spread to San Francisco, London, Singapore, and other cities around the world and have become yearly destinations for CX pros far and wide. CX Europe 2018 is just 12 days from now — Tuesday and Wednesday, […]

Making sense of the enterprise marketing technology (EMT) landscape can easily overwhelm even the most dedicated martech aficionado. 2018’s “Martech 5000” is astonishingly closer to 7,000 vendors, rendering vendor differentiation difficult and vendor selection a nightmare. Forrester recommends starting this process by categorizing vendors in terms of systems of insight (SOI) and systems of engagement […]

As I listened to Google’s Q3 2018 earnings conference call, the Taylor Swift song “Out Of The Woods” kept playing in my head. (This is the part where I pretend I tried to fight it. But let’s be honest, I didn’t mind.) As with the relationship in the song, I wondered if we were indeed […]

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 […]

To shift from brand monologues to two-way dialogues, many brands are embracing live chat and piloting marketing initiatives on new conversational interfaces such as chatbots and voice-based assistants. However, conversational marketing is not new: It is simply based on listening to your customers, incorporating feedback into your marketing strategy, and communicating back to them in […]

It’s frustrating when a customer exhibits purchase intent but doesn’t buy because of friction in the customer journey. It’s worse when a store manager or contact center agent is unaware of a digital promotion. Nearly 40% of CMOs say that a lack of consistent customer experience (CX) prevents greater online sales revenue. Empowered customers now […]

Points and discounts are the hallmark of most loyalty programs, and our data shows that they are usually pretty successful in incentivizing purchase behavior: Nearly half of US online 18–35-year-olds admit that programs influence what they buy and how much they spend. But loyalty isn’t just about the purchase — or at least it shouldn’t be. […]

I am very excited to have been invited for the third time to give the opening keynote speech at One to One, a great marketing conference taking place on October 10–12 in Biarritz in the southwest of France. To summarize my talk in a few points, I have shared some global marketing trends and how […]

Artificial intelligence is a big deal in marketing technology. Forrester sees strong potential in AI as an enabling technology for marketing, and it’s great to see many vendors embracing AI to enhance existing offerings and as the basis for new solutions. But for vendors, mastering AI technology alone isn’t enough to get to the top. […]

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in specific marketing applications such as programmatic real-time bidding is now commonplace. Although marketing has yet to adopt it more broadly, new use cases are gathering momentum. My latest report, “Leverage AI To Improve Marketing Efficiency,” covers the nine AI marketing use cases that have the potential to deliver […]

In a recent workshop with the marketing team of a large European brand, we discussed the importance for marketers to deliver their brand promise. About 45% of marketers now report to be in charge of the customer experience. Whether they officially own CX or simply orchestrate CX talent and resources does not matter. In that […]