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Create ‘Just Right’ Devices Using Convenience Analysis

Posted by Doug Williams on April 23, 2010

  • 216 Recommendations

Let's start with a poll.  To do so, first click on the title above to get to the full version of the blog.  Ok? Now, the poll is over there on the right, under the picture of yours truly.  Please vote, then continue....

Now that you've indicated how you feel about convenience, I'll tell you how we at Forrester feel about it.  Regular readers of the CPS Role Blog in the past will recall that Forrester strongly believes that convenience is the key determinant of a product, service or channel's success.  In fact, we've made convenience a cornerstone of our research for consumer product strategy professionals. 

As part of our ongoing efforts to evangelize the importance of convenience in consumer product strategy, my colleague Ian Fogg and I have just published another report in our Convenience Quotient series.  Code named "The Goldilocks Report," it offers an overview of how consumers are using their mobile phones and why early renditions of feature-laden phones failed.  The report also applies the Convenience Quotient methodology to mobile handsets by defining a comprehensive set of benefits and barriers that exist for mobile handsets, in an effort to help consumer product strategists build "just right" mobile devices.  One of the key takeaways from this report is that product strategy professionals can apply CQ across the product lifecycle: from product planning, to competitive analysis, to product positioning, to post-launch refinements, to product retirement. In each phase, convenience analysis can be used to make smart decisions about product strategy.

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Armin van Buuren: A Case Study for the Consumption Paradigm

Posted by Mark Mulligan on April 23, 2010

  • 220 Recommendations

Regular readers will be familiar with the mantra that I and my colleagues repeat: we are leaving the distribution era of the 20th century where music revenues were based upon selling units and entering the consumption paradigm, where monetizing consumption will be key to future success.

I recently came across a case study that illustrates well just how far along we are in the transition from a consumer perspective, if not yet from a business model viewpoint.

Armin van Buuren is a leading dance music DJ and producer, but unless you are Dutch, or a dance music aficionado it is unlikely you’ll be too familiar with him. Hailing from the Netherlands van Buuren has been producing music and DJing since the mid-nineties. Throughout the noughties he went from strength to strength, in no small part due to a very savvy use of digital technology including a weekly radio show (A State of Trance) that is syndicated across multiple analog and digital stations and platforms and reaches a weekly global audience of 40 million.

This context is important because van Buuren understands the importance of building an engaged digital audience. Which brings us onto the case study: his track ‘In and Out of Love’ featuring vocalist Sharon den Adel. The official video currently has 50.5 million views on YouTube. There are an addition 3.3 million unofficial video views of the track, of which 0.5 million are remixes and live versions. So that's a net total of just under 54 million views.

Consider those numbers for a moment. The biggest ever selling global single was Elton John’s Candle in the Wind in 1997 with 37 million copies. The biggest that the noughties had to offer was Leona Lewis’ ‘Bleeding Love’ with 12 million. Even Lady Gaga only made 11 million with 'Poker Face'. Getting to number in the UK charts can be done with less than 25,000 if you catch the charts on a bad week (Orson did it with just 17,694 in 2003 with ‘No Tomorrow’).

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Marketing Forum Day 1 Wrap-up

Posted by Christine Overby on April 22, 2010

Forrester forums always go by in a blur - so many ideas and conversations crammed into 2 short days. I'm still synthesizing, but even so, there are some key insights that I've jotted down from my seat in the speaker's gallery:

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Interview with ITSMA about Linking Global Strategy and Field Execution

Posted by Peter O'Neill on April 22, 2010

  • 238 Recommendations

By Peter O'Neill

The IT Services Marketing Association (ITSMA) has just published this interview with me to its members to coincide with my presentation on this topic at the Forrester Marketing Forum here in Los Angeles. For those European members of ITSMA, I’d like to point out that I will be hosting and contributing to the ITSMA workshop “Building the Business Case for Social Media in B2B Marketing” in London on May 5th. Perhaps I will see you there  . Anyway, I’m enjoying our conversations, so keep your comments and emails coming.   

Always keeping you informed!

Peter

 

In this Viewpoint, Peter O’Neill, VP & Principal Analyst, Forrester, shares his research on and passion for international technology industry marketing, with a specific emphasis on field marketing strategy and execution, including the dynamics of interactions between headquarters and field marketing organizations.

ITSMA:What challenges do marketers face due to globalization?

O’Neill: Our clients often ask the basic question: What does it mean to "go global"? Well, going global really means having customers in multiple countries—i.e., in local geographic

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Q&Agency: TandemSeven

Posted by Vidya Drego on April 22, 2010

  • 268 Recommendations

Welcome to Q&Agency! Each week, I get to talk to agencies small and large and get to hear (in their words) what differentiates them and the experiences they create. To help bring some of that information to you, I'm showcasing an ongoing series of interviews with small to mid-size interactive and design agencies. If you'd like to see your agency or an agency you work with here, let me know!

On April 21st, I talked with Frank Torbey the CEO of TandemSeven. Edited excerpts from that conversation follow.

Forrester: Tell me a little bit about your agency?

Frank: TandemSeven is a specialized user experience firm dedicated 100% to business applications and portals. We specialize in creating usable, intuitive interfaces for complex applications. We work with IT, product managers and business unit leaders to create strategic business applications that break out of the norm and deliver a whole new level of user experience. We’re the UX company for complex business and transactional applications.

We were founded in 2001 and have 55 employees in three offices in Boston, New York, and Chicago.

Forrester: What is your elevator pitch?

Frank: We’re the user experience experts for business applications and portals. Tomorrow’s business applications require a whole new level of user experience. Business users’ needs are evolving rapidly just like consumers' needs; they want highly intuitive and usable applications no matter what platform or device they’re using. We help companies like Bloomberg, JP Morgan, Orbitz, and others create applications where the user experience improves productivity and increases competitive advantage. We’re all about delivering business results for our clients by helping them deliver usable applications.

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Live Streaming from Forrester Marketing Forum 2010 - Day One

Posted by Christine Overby on April 22, 2010

  • 246 Recommendations

Update: Day 1 was a great dive into the theme of Adaptive Marketing. While Day 1 live-streaming is done, we’ve archived video below so that it’s available to you post-event.

We are so excited to be in Los Angeles hosting the 4th annual Forrester Marketing Forum! This year, we have 550 attendees from various industries and roles – all here to connect and discuss how to design a flexible marketing organization that thrives on change.

Our bang-up roster of keynotes include: Pam Kaufman, CMO of Nickelodeon; Steven Sickel, SVP of Marketing at Intercontinental Hotel Groups; Tom Boyles, SVP of Marketing at Walt Disney Parks and Resorts; James Cornell, CMO of Prudential Retirement; Chris Bradshaw, CMO at Autodesk (the software firm that made the movie Avatar possible); Deborah Nelson, SVP of Marketing at HP; and Marjorie Tenzer, VP of Marketing & Communications at IBM. Below are the highlights of the speeches and the twitter stream for those of you who couldn't make the trip and for those of your monitoring from the event.

How Do You Manage Multinational Social Media Programs? We'd Like To Know!

Posted by Nate Elliott on April 22, 2010

Lately, a lot of our clients have been asking about how to manage their social media programs across more than one country. It's a real challenge: While some sites (like MySpace) have long offered solutions to help marketers direct users from different countries to the correct branded page, the current social media leaders (Facebook, YouTube and Twitter) don't seem to do this nearly as well. How, then, do you make sure that the Facebook page on which you post UK-specific content doesn't misinform your European fans? How do make sure the support community designed to help your US customers doesn't confuse your Canadian audience? Do you create multiple pages in each social network to serve all the countries in which you operate? Or do you maintain a single presence in each network, and avoid posting any country-specific material? If you offer different product lines in different countries -- or use radically different marketing strategies market by market -- it only gets more difficult.

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Having Trouble Getting Organized? A Few Thoughts On Organizing For Marketing Today

Posted by Chad Mitchell on April 22, 2010

  • 198 Recommendations

I had the pleasure of participating in two CMO group discussions on marketing organizational structures in the past week. The Atlanta DMA focused on a recent Harvard Business Review article entitled "Rethinking Marketing For Tomorrow." The article suggests that value-based customer and brand management requires a reinvention of the marketing organizational structure. It's the common debate around product and brand-centric organizations versus customer-centric.

In addition, I facilitated the CMO group at Forrester's Marketing Forum today on "Organizing For Social Media." In February and March, I conducted 10 interviews with senior marketers including Best Buy, IBM, Louis Vuitton, and others about their current organizational design for social media. The CMO group discussed the challenges and best practices in organizing for social media.

The goods news…

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Wells Fargo Provides A Real-World Cross-Channel Example For eBusiness

Posted by Brad Strothkamp on April 21, 2010

“Cross-channel” is a term (or shall I say a buzzword) that is thrown around by many and understood by few. Seldom does a week go by that a vendor or client mentioning their objectives or strategy doesn’t throw out “cross-channel” or “multi-channel” or something along those lines.

With this in mind, I have made it my personal goal to seek out real-world examples of cross-channel at work; examples that have a clear benefit both to a customer and to a provider. Progressive Insurance’s cross-channel save and retrieve functionality is a great example of cross channel at work that I have written about before, but I recently came across another:

 Wells Fargo offering customers the opportunity to email ATM receipts to their email address on record.

This feature gets at the heart of a concept I have been thinking about for a while; the concept that the Web can have a role to play in enhancing offline processes that already exist. I mean the emailed receipt doesn’t replace the trip to the ATM, but it does make it better by:

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The New Business Paradigm: Find Your Popcorn

Posted by Nick Thomas on April 21, 2010

  • 224 Recommendations

If you’ve been following the coverage from the CPS team over the past 12 months you’ll be familiar with the concept of the Media Meltdown - where traditional business models based on scarcity and control of content are fundamentally undermined by the digitization of content. The challenge facing media companies is a grave one: how can they respond to this threat and compete in this challenging new environment?

With this post we are launching a major new project, the conclusion of which will be a new report identifying new paradigms for the content industries, based on adopting best practices from other industries and from historical precedents. But this time, given our focus at Forrester on the importance of social media and the Groundswell, we invite you to contribute to the research process. In this and a series of future postings, including a series of video podcasts, I want to share our thinking on these issues at it emerges from the process of iteration and evaluation – the kind of process which normally happens within the Forrester team. We have a big idea, but in order to develop it into a fully-realised and actionable piece of research, we would like your input.

We start with an observation that has stuck with me ever since I studied film history at university, a reality reinforced when I later worked in the movie industry. Films don’t make profit for cinema owners. Not directly, anyway. As content owners consider ways to force ungrateful consumers to pay for the content they consume, it’s worth revisiting a truism about the cinema, one of the 20th century’s most enduring media businesses. Movies get people into the cinemas, and generate ticket sales. But if you want to make a profit, sell them popcorn.

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