data insights

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 […]

Have you ever met an executive by chance in a hallway and they asked you about some data-to-insights work you’ve presented? And you were caught off guard and didn’t explain it well?   We’ve all been there. When we come up short like that, we’re leaving money – and time – on the table. We just […]

The mundane exercise of measuring and analyzing marketing performance has gotten a much-needed boost over the past few years thanks to the development of advanced test and learn approaches, attribution modeling, and, even marketing mix modeling. Advanced marketers with rigorous marketing performance standards  must consider advancing their marketing insights, by bridging the gap between marketing […]

My parents were recently gifted their first Amazon Echo — and as you might guess, I’ve been thrilled to observe first-hand how a household of relative tech Luddites responds to the device. Delighted fascination, tempered by security concerns, drives these Baby Boomers to test the depth of Alexa’s knowledge by asking one-off random questions. My […]

I would like to introduce myself as a new data researcher at Forrester Research. Before joining Forrester, I earned my Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from Duke University where I focused on building predictive models of decision making. I combined behavioral economics principles with computational methodologies to create robust models of the internal and external motivators […]

We said this a year ago, but alas, we have to say it again. There’s a big insights-to-actions gap out there.  Firms continue to invest in data, people, and technology, but in 2017, data and analytics pros reported basing fewer business decisions on data (45%) than in 2016 (49%).  If you don’t feel pressured by […]

Last week was a massive week for marketers. Black Friday 2017 hit record numbers: Not only did shoppers start early, they began clicking at a rate of 2,800 orders per minute, spending $1 million per minute at the peak of Black Friday. Research shows that email is a major driver to get consumers’ attention during […]

Why The Right Web Analytics Platform Is (Even More) Business Critical Forrester just recently published The Forrester Wave™: Web Analytics, Q4 2017. In it we rank the leading web analytics platform provides including Adobe, AT Internet, Cooladata, Google, IBM, Mixpanel, and Webtrekk. “Why should I care?”, you may ask.  After all when it comes to […]

Like many digital native startups, data analytics underpinned peer-to-peer eCommerce site Etsy’s operations since the company was founded in 2005. In their early days , their struggles to achieve true customer understanding led to poor digital experiences for its sellers and the failure to accurately capture customer preferences. Etsy turned this around by building out […]

Organization are slow to change but technology changes quickly. If you leave the organization as is many won’t catch up with the change, and the technology maturity gap will widen between them over time. I saw this described in breakout panel at Strata Data in New York a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, the speaker left […]

Last week I presented a webinar “A New Age for Smart Cities” as part of Philips’ Lighting University. Many cities have invested in new lighting initiatives replacing traditional lights with LED solutions including remote management capabilities.  But the talk last week stressed the need for these initiatives to be part of a broader strategy.  It […]

Streaming behavior continues to increase among consumers, and TV viewing – whether it is through live TV, DVRs, or OTT devices – is a critical part of the viewing mix. With the recent surge in streaming offerings (both individual and those from cable/network content providers), consumers are seizing the chance to control what, when, and […]