Recently, I published a report about Australian online retail in 2012. The report contains data, examples and detail as you've come to expect for Forrester, but the top line is that in 2012:

• Mobile commerce will strengthen its place as an important part of Australia's online retail mix
• Marginal daily deal sites will fold, merge, or sell
• Local lean startups will bring mass customization to more customers, placing pressure on the retail giants that lag in this area
• A plucky few companies will find a way to combine the speed of online startups with the scale of the retail giants
• Couriers, software developers and other partners to online retail will step up their efforts to provide the services that eBusiness professionals actually require

As part of my "The eBusiness Innovation eBusiness Imperative" report I identified the five megatrends transforming eBusiness: mobile, local, personal, social, and emotional. 

"What's that?" I hear you say. "What's emotional?" Well, don't worry — that was the megatrend that stumped most people. But it shouldn't, because everywhere we look, eBusiness professionals are striving to creating more emotionally engaging transactional experiences.

Consider online retail, which is still the most visible form of eBusiness. Creating an eBusiness experience that's less of a chore than traditional shopping is easy. But creating an experience that inspires some of the positive emotions associated with traditional shopping at its best — security, status, even fun — is much, much harder. However, it can be done. For example, the idea to write this blog post came from Mag Nation's "magdentifier," which asks some fun questions before showing you a range of magazines tailored to your interests. For me, playing with the magdentifier was fun. For the first time, it made me consider giving a magazine subscription as a gift.

eBusiness in Australia is in a period of extraordinary development. On a near-daily basis, we see the launch of determined new retailers — from fashion eyewear vendor Sneaking Duck to subscription pet food provider Paws For Life — as well as new services to support the sector, like Want It Now's same-day delivery system. Yet ample "blue sky" remains for entrepreneurs who are willing to take a crack at this sector. Of these countless opportunities, four come to mind immediately:

• A personal finance-management system. Mint still hasn't come to Australia. The Australian Taxation Office's e-Tax is still a painful way to submit tax returns. You still never meet someone who says "I use ANZ Money Manager".  Saasu and Xero still support businesses but not individuals. If anyone stepped up to offer in Australia what Mint offers in the US and Canada today, thousands of customers — incuding me — would rush to get onboard, and Australian's finance-sector eBusiness professionals would have a collective heart-attack.

A few months ago, I asked marketing leaders: Does the funnel still work for you? Or are you moving onto something else?

This led to some very interesting briefings and an enormous amount of thinking and debate. The upshot: It's time to bury the marketing funnel.

The marketing funnel, shown below on the left, is a simple and broad-ranging model, which is part of its appeal. However, it's from an earlier era and does a poor job of summarizing how we think about customers and marketing today. Luckily, the customer life cycle, shown below on the right, is as clear and usable as the funnel but provides a far better fit with marketing in the 21st century.

I could write an entire report about why the customer life cycle should replace the funnel — and in fact, I have — but here are just some of the reasons:

• The role of marketing. At its worst, the funnel portrays marketing as a conveyer belt with the job of delivering a continuous supply of customers to the business. On the other hand, the customer life cycle portrays marketing as the function that is responsible for orchestrating the total brand experience. 
• The value of the customer. In the funnel, a prospect is a prospect, and a sale is a sale. It's a volume-based model. On the other hand, every customer group has its own life cycle, including its own lifetime value, and its own journey.

Is your fiscal year also your calendar year? If the answer is yes, then you have my sympathies. Your budget season has probably begun, negotiations will be tough, and the outcome is uncertain.

The background for 2011 negotiations will be the experience of 2010, a year in which marketing budgets rose cautiously at best, as I show in my latest research. This was despite the fact that marketers who responded to Forrester's February 2010 Global Marketing Leadership Online Survey were more than twice as likely to see signs of economic recovery in their industry as to not see them. B2B marketing leaders fared worse than their B2C counterparts:

The areas of marketing that fared the worst were those that were viewed as being expensive, and with low or uncertain ROI. For B2B, that meant sponsorships, trade shows, and traditional media. For B2C, it meant print advertising, agency fees, and direct mail. Conversely, all of the growth areas were related to digital media in one way or another.

So what does that mean for CMOs entering budget season? My advice would be to focus on measurable program elements that are designed around business objectives. That sounds obvious, but the surprising truth is that many of the CMOs whom we surveyed said they were shifting budget to areas they considered "strategic," which falls far short of this standard.