Last week, I had the pleasure of attending the Future of Consumer Intelligence conference in San Francisco. This week, when I reflect back on the conference topics and energy, I realize how fitting San Francisco was as the location of the event: Much like the essence of the city itself, the conference speakers and attendees showed ingenuity and optimism around the challenges and opportunities that the market research industry faces. I also thought about the same conference that I attended last May (IIR Market Research Technology Event 2012) and the key themes that I gathered and blogged about: Big data is here, integrating survey and behavioral data is powerful, and behavioral economics has huge implications for market research. For me, the big difference between last year’s conference and this year’s is this: A year ago, market insight professionals were sizing up their challenges with the future of market research. This year, they are taking the bull by the horns and embracing both the challenges and opportunities that technology in market research presents. Here are the main themes I gathered from the event:

As we published last month, people are in the midst of making a Mobile Mind Shift:

The expectation that any desired information or service is available, on any appropriate device, in context, at your moment of need.

Our research on the Mobile Mind Shift and our global surveys allow us to examine in detail how attitudes and behaviors are shifting around the world. While the shift is undeniable and is rapidly accelerating, the regional variations are fascinating.

In a speech today at the Forrester Marketing Leadership Forum EMEA, I revealed that Europeans are in general behind Americans on the Mobile Mind Shift. Here's a slide from that speech, showing the spread between Europe and the US:

I attended FinovateSpring 2013 last week to get a preview of new products from digital technology vendors for financial services. For those of you that have not been to Finovate, it’s a little like innovation speed dating – where 72 vendors have 7 minutes to win the hearts of the audience to secure the “Best of Show” Award.  At last year’s conference, a few new topics emerged: Personal Financial Management, payments, rewards, coupons, and mobile banking services for Pre-Paid Visas customers. This year the focus was still on PFM and payments, but one new topic hit the stage full force: authentication, which is this year’s new black. Sexy, I know!

While there was plenty of interesting and innovative demonstrations, Forrester attended the conference to identify trends and solutions relevant for our retail digital financial services clients. Specifically, we looked at innovative solutions that helped ourclients either deliver on a customer need or solve a core customer problem in the retail banking realm. At this year’s conference, I noticed that:

• Big data and PFM got married...And,had a little MoneyDesktop. Money Desktop, the best in show winner, debuted their Insight and Target platforms—providing financial institutions the ability to create and send targeted marketing content and product offerings based on customer relevancy.

Now that Yahoo has announced its acquisition of Tumblr for $1.1 billion in cash — about a quarter of its cash reserves — the top three questions I see are:

• How will Yahoo manage to retain, and grow, the Tumblr user base while monetizing it? Today, Tumblr is quite unprofitable, and its lack of advertising is one of the many attributes that have made it popular. Yahoo has a very difficult balancing act ahead: It has to keep Tumblr's current active user base passionately engaged and spending time on the site, while also finding a way to add advertising and other revenue sources. Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s CEO, stated the ads will be “very light” and “really fit users’ expectations”; however, Ken Goldman, Yahoo’s CFO, added that Tumblr should "materially contribute to revenues" in 2014 and beyond. If users do not stay with the service, they will have bought a ghost town. 
• Can the Tumblr user base be the next influx of loyal Yahoo users? Yahoo still has a massive user base, with at least 200 million users of Mail alone, and a passionate audience on Flickr. However, it is seeking its next core audience, and Tumblr users could fit the bill.  This is a similar challenge to Facebook's motivation for acquiring Instagram, however Facebook has so far held off on adding advertising to the Instagram platform. 
• How will Tumblr fit into Yahoo’s existing product portfolio? Yahoo has announced it plans to keep Tumblr independent, leaving both its brand and management intact. However, over time, there will be pressure to integrate it more and more tightly with other Yahoo properties. Will existing Yahoo products gain some of Tumblr’s social DNA, or will Tumblr lose some of what makes it unique?

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 backyard. 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 21st century is that — for leading brands — it is now a companywide 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 employees' 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 PowerPoint 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 frontline employees.