content mRyan Skinner says, “It’s Groundhog’s Day, when a sleepy landpig emerges from his little mancave and entertains questions from the press about astronomical phenomena!As good a day as any to share a few content trends where we at Forrester expect to see considerable acceleration this year.Here are your 6 content trends and one wannabe-trend that won’t trend in 2017.Interspersed with unrelated cat fail gifs, because who doesn’t love a good cat fail gif or two?The first megatrendDirect-to-consumer pushes CPG out of the brand advertising comfort zoneDirect-to-consumer plays... [...]

Julie Ask says, “Apple announced its Q1 FY2017 earnings yesterday. They sold a lot of iPhone 7’s and beat sales estimates. More interesting to me though was the news on Apple Pay … the number of Apple Pay users tripled in the past year, with hundreds of millions of transactions and billions of dollars in purchases in the December quarter alone. This represents nearly 500% increase for Apple Pay transactions year-on-year! Forrester data shows that 11% of online consumers have used Apple Pay. Among those, almost ? use Apple Pay all the time or frequently when it is available. For full... [...]

Kate Leggett says, “In today’s world, customers decide how customer-centric a company is. Good customer service should capture the fundamentals of a great experience: ease, effectiveness, and emotionLooking ahead, Forrester sees 10 trends for 2017 that customer service professionals should take into account as they move the needle on the quality of service that they deliver: Here are six of them:Customer service organizations address a smaller volume of simple voice-based customer contacts as they mature their self-service, automated engagement, and digital operations.Trend No.... [...]

Samantha Merlivat says, “Intuitively, it makes sense that if a consumer engages with a brand’s ad or marketing message, this should count as a positive outcome. Yet, we’ve spoken to a number of marketers and measurement companies that found that optimizing for engagement ultimately did not help them drive positive business outcomes – instead leading them to waste time and media dollars on the wrong users.The issue we keep encountering in discussions around engagement is that advertisers count interactions – clicks, shares, likes, comments, views – as proxies for engagement. There’s... [...]

Heidi Shey says, “Each year at the end of summer, several members of Forrester’s Security & Risk research team look back at publicly reported breach events and data privacy violations of the previous 12 months to spot trends and identify cases to feature where we feel there are lessons learned for S&R pros. In 2016, this was a joint effort alongside my colleague Fatemeh Khatibloo from Forrester’s Customer Insights research team. Leading up to Data Privacy Day, I’d like to share some lessons learned from one of the five key trends we saw in our 2016 analysis.The intersection... [...]

Martin Gill says, “One of the best parts about being a Research Director here at Forrester, rather than an Analyst, is I get to be involved in a wider range of research topics than before. I’ve always been interested in mobile, but I’ve never really covered it as a subject. We have an embarrassment of way more qualified analysts like Julie Ask, Mike Facemire, Jenny Wise, and Thomas Husson to name a few. Their knowledge on the subject far outstrips mine. So it’s been a fun journey over the last six months working with Ted Schadler as he’s espoused one simple, powerful, unequivocal... [...]

Tina Moffett says, “Over the course of my career–as a marketing analytics practitioner and as a Forrester analyst–I’ve tried to tackle some of the most pressing questions around measuring marketing’s effectiveness. I’ve seen a recent surge of marketers using the metric “engagement” being tossed around as a way to measure marketing success. When I start to question what they mean by the term “engagement” and how they measure it, I’m often met with a flurry of answers, including a running list of metrics–such as likes, shares, or time spent on site–that... [...]

Samantha Merlivat says, “Intuitively, it makes sense that if a consumer engages with a brand’s ad or marketing message, this should count as a positive outcome. Yet, we’ve spoken to a number of marketers and measurement companies that found that optimizing for engagement ultimately did not help them drive positive business outcomes – instead leading them to waste time and media dollars on the wrong users.The issue we keep encountering in discussions around engagement is that advertisers count interactions – clicks, shares, likes, comments, views – as proxies for engagement. There’s... [...]

Lori Wizdo says, “I think we all accept that business buyers have higher expectations in the age of the customer. They’ve fundamentally changed their buying behavior in this digital age. Unfortunately, too many B2B marketers aren’t keeping pace. They must evolve from brand stewards, lead generation machines, and sales supporters to architects of customer engagement across the customer life cycle. B2B marketing leaders need to introduce a change agenda to help B2B marketers lead the transformation to customer-obsessed marketing. Here are some key takeaways from my recent report... [...]

Ted Schadler says, “It’s increasingly challenging for marketers to earn loyalty as empowered consumers become entitled customers with more options than ever before. My latest report, Case Study: Max Factor China Rejuvenates Customers’ Loyalty With Social CRM, tells marketers how to leverage social CRM to define an effective loyalty strategy that spans the entire customer life cycle, across channels.The US cosmetics brand Max Factor has been growing its business steadily since it entered the Chinese market in 2009. However, Max Factor has faced growing challenges in recent years:–... [...]