Image source: Universal Pictures

At Finovate Europe in London, the leading event on innovation in financial services, I met a strange banker. He claimed to be from the year 1993 and had been sent in a time machine to London to check out  Finovate's 2013 latest innovations; he would then return to 1993 to implement them at his firm. Curious, I asked him about his key findings:

1.       Inefficiencies in the value chain will be punished. A good example: Money-wiring services are faster and cheaper via peer-to-peer platforms, like those shown by TransferWise and Azimo, than via Western Union or MoneyGram.

2.       The user experience on banking platforms is becoming more engaging. This starts with smooth and speedy onboarding solutions like the one from Five Degrees and moves on to the personalized and engaging dashboards with widgets from Backbase and the award winning Banktron solution form Etronika.

Earlier this week, I attended a briefing with a vendor around analyzing and structuring consumer ratings and reviews; the vendor aims to give companies more guidance during the product development stage or help them understand where a current product is in its life cycle depending on the number of reviews that product is getting compared with its competitors.

The concept is interesting, but it got me thinking about the process of ratings and reviews a bit more. How many people are actually giving ratings and reviews, who are they, and why are they giving feedback?

Forrester’s Consumer Technographics® global online benchmark surveys in Q2 2012 revealed a wide variation between countries in terms of the share of the online population that actually gives feedback. In metropolitan India and China, about three-quarters of online consumers post ratings/reviews of products or services at least monthly; in Brazil, it’s about a third; while in the US and Europe, it’s less than 20%.

However, far more people rely on ratings and reviews than give them — particularly in the US and Europe. More than 50% of US online consumers check ratings and reviews regularly, for example. And consumer reviews and ratings are the second most trusted source of online shoppers when buying a product, after family and friends.

Are you thinking hard about what you should be on the lookout for as a marketer in 2013? We think it will be a transformative year. Here’s why.

The biggest change we see underway is the amazingly rapid increase in the number of people who access the Internet multiple times a day, from multiple locations, with at least three devices. They’re ultra-connected and always addressable, and by the end of 2012, these perpetually connected customers already made up 42% of online adults in the US and 37% in Europe, up from much less than that just a year before. By the end of 2013, we predict that almost half of online adults globally will join this revolution.

As a marketer facing this surge of perpetually connected customers, you need to seize the opportunity and:

• Master multichannel marketing now more than ever.
• Make ads more personal, but stop short of creepy.
• Get smart about what happens before the last click.
• Learn about new, exotic breeds of marketing tech vendors.
• Rethink how you work with other functions and outside agencies.

For more specifics about what we mean by these recommendations and what we believe this year has in store for marketers, read our February 11^th "2013 Interactive Marketing Predictions" report. And let us know what you think, will you?

It’s Valentine’s Day, so shout it as loud as you can: “I love my customers!” Now, prove it by designing products, services, and experiences that actually meet their needs. How are you going to do that? By involving actual customers (as well as employees and partners) in the design process.

This collaborative activity, called co-creation, might ring a bell — two of my recent blog posts addressed what co-creation means and what the benefits are. Co-creation is a versatile and valuable methodology. And while it might seem effortless, it usually doesn’t happen on the fly — which is why Amelia Sizemore and I wrote our latest report, tackling the logistics behind planning a stress-free and productive co-creation workshop.

Newbies often assume that the workshop itself will be the most challenging part of a co-creation initiative, but most of the heavy lifting actually occurs before participants ever show up. Advanced preparation — and lots of it — ensures a smooth and productive workshop that feels like it runs itself. For example, you need to:

• Hook participants with the right incentives. T. Rowe Price asked a lot of its participants — in addition to a full-day co-creation workshop, participants completed a 30-day diary study and a phone interview. In exchange, the company rewarded each person with an iPad.