data insights

In this battle between direct-to-consumer (DTC) startups — cast as the proverbial David — and their large, established brand opponents, victory is not about size or stature; it’s about skillful weaponry. In fact, if one looks at DTC startups’ long-term growth numbers, a scorecard tally suggests that today’s Goliaths will continue to dominate consumer retail […]

Every company has a specific DNA. You may think DNA is the brand or values. But corporate DNA is what makes a company tick, not what the company is. Talent, operations, technology, and data make up your base pairs. How those combine will have a specific outcome for the business, and even the overall sequence […]

It’s early February. Punxsutawney Phil predicted an early spring this year, and there is hope (and warmth) in the air.[i] But it’s not always rosy for you as a data, analytics, and insights leader. You tirelessly toil to get value from your enterprise data and try to apply those insights at scale to impact business […]

I’m often asked the question, “What’s my data worth?” And my immediate (and somewhat provocative) response is “Nothing!” Data is, without a doubt, valuable. But when stored in vaults and locked down, it is not. As the American inventor Thomas Edison asserted, “The value of an idea lies in the using of it.” That sentiment […]

Like most people, I consider November a good time to start thinking about the clean slate that a new year brings. There is lots of room to reflect on one year and get ready for the next one with a bit more, well, “resolve,” so to speak. I’ll be an all-around better person, for sure — […]

I remember a few years ago when, as enterprise architects, we sat around in the office of the VP of architecture and planned our data strategy on the whiteboard. Replace that clunky warehouse with a modern appliance? Check. Enterprise data model? Of course! The dreaded data governance plan? Yup, but our discussion was about IBM’s […]

Web Summit took place for the third time in Lisbon earlier in November. Over the years, Web Summit has become one of the leading global conferences to discuss everything technology. The large presence of startups and fast pace of presentations across many different stages give Web Summit a particular edge. It is impossible for a single […]

There’s a recurring assumption in discussions about internet of things (IoT) platforms: The platform providers make their money by mining insights from data loaded into their platform. They sell those insights back to the customer who put the data there in the first place and will also sell them to anyone else who can pay. […]

I’m getting more and more psyched about our first-ever Data Strategy & Insights 2018 Forum as I work on the sessions with my colleagues here at Forrester and with our external speakers. The topics are spot on for what organizations need from data and analytics today, and the sessions are going to be inspirational and […]

Feeling overwhelmed with all the data that your teams must wrangle before even getting to data science? Feeling like you have more than enough dashboards and tools? Feeling like you don’t have any more room in your complex data and analytics environment for yet another platform? Feeling like you can’t keep up with the exploding […]

On paper, customer experience (CX) is about people creating memorable experiences for other people. But in reality, resonating with consumers is complex and messy. Customers approach your brand with unique emotional profiles, tendencies, and preferences that shape how they feel about your CX. Like people themselves, CX isn’t objective or static — its quality relies […]

Enterprises are sitting on mountains of unstructured data — 61% have more than 100 terabytes, and 12% have more than five petabytes! Luckily, there are mature technologies out there that can help. First, enterprise information architects should consider general-purpose text analytics platforms. These are capable of handling most, if not all, text analytics use cases, both […]

Last week, I had the opportunity to speak at a dinner event with 20-plus senior marketers and business partners that InsideView sponsored. We wanted to explore how well marketing and sales are facing up to new go-to-market (GTM) challenges associated with buyer behavior change in general, account-based marketing (ABM) specifically. To get the conversation going, […]

The American showman P.T. Barnum understood the value of online consumer reviews well before the arrival of the internet when he said, “Nothing draws a crowd quite like a crowd.” While consumer reviews generate buzz, they stop just short of being a circus because they’ve won immense levels of consumer trust. But two of the […]

We’ve been researching values-based consumers for several years now, and conversation in the C-suite has progressed from “Are values really important?” to “How do we strategize accordingly?” But every now and then, lingering questions crop up that lead to misguided decision making around values. Here are two common misconceptions — and why they are wrong. […]

I’m often asked the question, “What’s my data worth?” And my immediate (and somewhat provocative) response is “Nothing!” As the data economy heats up, the fear of being left behind leaves some company execs in a cold sweat. Forward-looking board members ask about data commercialization strategies and expect answers. That question — “What’s my data worth?” — […]

I just had the pleasure of attending a Forrester Leadership Boards workshop followed by our Consumer Marketing Forum in New York City.  As usual, data challenges remain top of mind for most marketers – siloed data, dirty data, inaccessible data… the usual suspects.  However, there was also a data manifestation of an age old organizational […]

Today I’m on stage in New York speaking to hundreds of marketing executives at our Consumer Marketing Forum 2018. I’m there to unveil the 2018 US Benchmark Data Overview, which for the first time ever we are making available to all Forrester clients. See the report here: The Consumer Tech Stack. The research is exciting. […]

Like a football team captain at a junior high dance, Amazon just sauntered up to a big group of people and started dropping hints about its sweet moves on the dance floor . . . Okay, that’s not exactly what’s happening here, but it sure felt like that to many bank executives who heard the […]