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Huawei Analyst Summit 2011: Extending The Competition To Mobile Devices And Enterprise Solutions

Posted by Dan Bieler on the Vendor Strategy Professionals Blog on November 9, 2011

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Dan Bieler

During its European Analyst Summit in London, Huawei provided details regarding two crucial elements of its expanding market positioning: It outlined its intention to launch mobile devices and enterprise solutions. Although Huawei has been engaged in these activities in China for some time, it is a new and exciting step for its European strategy. Competitors should not underestimate Huawei’s ability to take business away from them in these areas.

Huawei’s mobile device range for Europe is small, but very effective. The company targets the low-end smartphone segment with a €100 device (Blaze), the mid-market (Vision), and high-end (Honour), in addition to a tablet (Media Pad). The marketing strategy is to position these devices as affordable, easy-to-use, and reliable (i.e., the “Volkswagen of the mobile devices”). All devices are touch, have fast processors, crisp screens, and retail at about €100 below competitors’ offerings. Timing is good for Huawei, given the relative weakness of the competitive landscape, especially RIM and Sony Ericsson. Initial customer feedback on sites such as Amazon.com reflects positive customer experiences.

The fact that Huawei has no consumer brand in many European countries should not be a great obstacle. Rather, Huawei could use this factor in order to involve its emerging customer base to build a brand using social networking and viral marketing. Traditional big-board advertising campaigns would be pointless: Nokia will dominate the traditional channels with its Lumia campaign in the coming months. The main channels for Huawei will be MVNOs like Fonic, consumer electronics outlets like Phone4U, as well as selected larger operators.

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Twitter And My Spring 2010 Schedule

Posted by Joseph Stanhope on the Customer Intelligence Professionals Blog on April 27, 2010

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Joseph Stanhope

I was traveling for the past couple weeks in the United Kingdom to meet with clients.  Following a set of very successful meetings I ran into a bit of trouble.  Just as I was planning to return home a volcano in Iceland erupted and brought air travel in Europe to a standing halt.  I had to spend an additional 6 days in London. I never thought I would utter that combination of words, it just goes to show that sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

(picture credited to AP Photo/Icelandic Coast Guard)

All things considered I can't complain too much.  Obviously it is never fun to have travel plans disrupted or to be away from family longer than anticipated.  But there are far worse places to be stranded than London!  It's a wonderful city.  And I have many clients, colleagues and friends there, so I kept quite busy, and was able to work from Forrester's London office while awaiting the green light to come home.  About a dozen Forrester employees were in a similar situation, and the company did a great job of making sure we were ok and provided much needed support; I'm sure many travelers were not so fortunate.

It is interesting how the web became my constant companion as I made my best efforts to stay productive during the crisis and find my way home.  I frequented the travel websites (American Airlines, Marriott), the UK and EU air transport authorities (NATS), news sites (BBC and Sky), and most of all Twitter (#ashtag) to stay up to date on the volcano news and ensure that I had a place to sleep every night, and a seat reserved on the earliest flight home.  Turning to Twitter for real-time, crowdsourced news was a real revelation: they often scooped the big news websites; and it provided a sense of community, a lot of us were stuck in this mess together!

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New Agency Research

Posted by Dave Frankland on the Customer Intelligence Professionals Blog on March 29, 2010

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Dave Frankland

Sean Corcoran, Vidya Drego and I just published a report on The Future Of Agency Relationships. The report is written for CMOs and includes a call for marketing leaders to lead agency change to survive in the Adaptive Marketing era. We posit that marketers should assess their partners using three I's — ideas, interaction, and intelligence — to select the right partners. Sean posted a blog post this morning on the Marketing Leadership blog, and Ad Age featured the report on today’s front page.

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Online Testing and Targeting Platforms - We want your input!

Posted by Joseph Stanhope on the Customer Intelligence Professionals Blog on March 4, 2010

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Joseph Stanhope

Greetings from beautiful Salt Lake City, Utah, where I'm at the 2010 Omniture Summit. It's been a good week, I must say that my favorite part has been the opportunity to meet with so many web analytics practitioners, friends, Forrester clients and the Omniture team.  If you didn't attend but are interested in getting a feel for the event, check out the Twitter hashtag, #omtrsummit.

I am pleased to announce that this week we are initiating the research process for the inaugural Forrester Wave™ evaluation of Online Testing and Targeting platforms.  We plan to publish this Wave report in the third quarter of 2010. Upon completion this research will be distributed to senior marketing executives at hundreds of large marketing organizations globally.

The first phase of the process is to determine the field of vendors who comprise the Online Testing and Targeting landscape.  We have already identified and contacted a number of companies who participate in the market via previous research efforts.

Forrester is actively innovating our use of social media, and this extends to the research process.  I would like to solicit your input through two modes of participation:

1. If you are a practitioner, please share which Online Testing and Targeting vendors you currently or have previously used.  Also please let me know if you would be interested in receiving followup communications to discuss your experiences with vendors and online testing in general.

2. If you represent a vendor in the Online Testing and Targeting space and would like to be considered for inclusion in the Wave report please let me know and we'll send you  our preliminary vendor survey to complete and submit.

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