There’s a lot of effort exerted by marketing leaders to turn customers into brand advocates.  But their customers have a lot of brand choices and a lot of other things on their minds. What these marketers are overlooking is the potential brand advocates in their own back yard.  Their employees.  Employees are fundamentally connected to, thinking about and representing your brand every day.  They are often your biggest fans.

Indeed, our research shows that one of the biggest shifts of brand building in the twenty-first century is that --for leading brands-- it is now a company-wide effort.   A unanimous 100% of marketing leaders surveyed by Forrester agreed that brand building requires all employees to be brand ambassadors.   But the companies they lead are not yet living up to this aspiration.  While many marketers’ eyes light up at the prospect of tapping in to their employee’s Twitter networks, just focusing on social is missing the point.  Yes social is a valuable tool to create conversation.  But true employee brand advocacy requires Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) to go deeper. They need to make delivering a superior brand experience part of the enterprise culture.  Brand advocacy can’t be another task on someone’s to do list.  Make brand building part of how employees do their job and guide them by the light of a clear brand North Star so that your powerful new army marches to the same drumbeat.   Forrester’s three step framework guides the way:

• Excite with an inspiring brand experience.  A power point presentation at the company meeting just won’t cut it.  Bring the brand to life for your employees.  Starbucks invested a staggering $35 million to create an interactive brand lab to bring the brand experience to life for its front-line employees. 

One of the best TV comedies in the UK over the last couple of years has been The IT Crowd. It is about a fictional IT department and plays to all the possible IT stereotypes. One of my favorite scenes is from the very first episode in which a ‘user’ is left waiting for their call to be answered for an excruciating amount of time and then another ‘IT professional’ is shown speaking to a ‘user’ in complete technology gobbledygook. Yes, this clip is funny but surely these are all extreme cases and only slim comparisons can be made to Enterprise IT today? 

I have to be honest here and say that during my time as an enterprise management consultant I saw all that happened on this clip, but surely modern day IT organizations don’t suffer from these problems? Well, maybe not to the same extent but how often have you heard, or even whispered, these famous words when working with the IT service desk or help desk:

 “Have-you-logged-a-ticket?”

Background – High Performance Attached Processors, Handicapped by Architecture

The application of high-performance accelerators, notably GPUs, GPGPUs (APUs in AMD terminology) to a variety of computing problems has blossomed over the last decade, resulting in ever more affordable compute power for both horizon and mundane problems, along with growing revenue streams for a growing industry ecosystem, most recently joined by Intel’s Xeon Phi accelerators which have to potential to speed adoption even further due to hoped-for synergies generated by the immense universe of x86 code that could potentially run on the Xeon Phi cores.

However, despite any potential synergies, GPUs (I will use this term generically to refer to all forms of these attached accelerators as they currently exist on the market) suffer from a fundamental architectural problem – they are very distant, in terms of latency, from the main scalar system memory and are not part of the coherent memory domain. This in turn has major impacts on performance, cost, design of the GPUs, and the structure of the algorithms:

• Performance – The latency for memory accesses generally dictated by PCIe latencies, which while much improved over previous generations, are a factor of 100 or more longer than latency from coherent cache or local scalar CPU memory. While clever design and programming, such as overlapping and buffering multiple transfers can hide the latency in a series of transfers, it is difficult to hide the latency for an initial block of data. Even AMD’s integrated APUs, in which the GPU elements are on a common die, do not share a common memory space, and explicit transfers are made in and out of the APU memory.

At Forrester, we define customer experience as how customers perceive their interactions with your company.

Over the past few years, my colleagues and I have written a lot about the perceptions piece of that definition. Here’s a quick overview: Customers’ perceptions occur on three different levels, which we collectively refer to as the customer experience pyramid.  At the base of the pyramid is “meets needs.” Do customers perceive that you’ve met their basic needs and provided value through the interaction? Then we layer on “easy.” Do customers perceive that you’re easy to do business with, or that they have to jump through a bunch of hoops? At the top of the pyramid is “enjoyable.” Do customers perceive that you’re enjoyable to do business with – that you’re connecting with them on some personal, emotional level?

Now let’s talk about the interactions themselves. Customers interact with your company at all stages of the customer journey: discover, evaluate, buy, access, use, get support, leave, and re-engage. But it’s not enough to know that these interactions exist. If you want to shift your customers’ perceptions, you have to examine those interactions on a deeper level. Specifically, you need to look at the types of interactions customers have and the qualities that those interactions embody. And that’s where your business model and your brand come into play.

CEOs and other senior executives must identify ways to improve their enterprise performance by boosting profitability, raising market share, and leapfrogging competitors. But achieving these objectives is not as simple as just looking at the numbers. What about nonfinancial measures (e.g., customer loyalty and employee satisfaction) that don’t show up in financial accounting? How do you quickly and efficiently get the full 360-degree view of your business?

In order to execute their business strategy, business and IT execs need a business-focused, strategic, and pragmatic way to measure their finances and operations — popularly referred to as business intelligence (BI). Without such measurements — supported by enterprisewide BI deployments — businesses can’t link operational results to strategy. Organizations will also find it difficult to get a coherent view of their internal and external processes, customers, logistics, operations, and finances.

However, most firms struggle with BI strategies and programs because turning data into information is an open-ended concept. They frequently go in the wrong direction because of traditional (and often outdated) views and approaches and a focus on technology instead of business, which results in BI programs that are tactical and only project-based. What these firms need is an approach to BI that, while staying true to the importance of long-term vision and looking across silos, provides the flexibility to accommodate varying levels of resource commitment and the political, historical, and cultural obstacles that BI programs often face. Think of Forrester’s new business intelligence playbook as your BI bible; it should guide your BI decisions every step of the way.