About Forrester
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Shar serves Marketing Leadership professionals. She is a leading expert on how businesses can leverage interactive marketing channels and technologies to drive sales and deepen customer relationships. During her 12 years with Forrester, Shar has been instrumental in the development of many of the company's interactive marketing program evaluation methodologies, training courses, and marketing planning tools and has also been part of Forrester's sales and consulting organizations.
Shar's research focuses on overall interactive marketing strategies; crafting efficient, effective interactive programs; organizing for interactive marketing; and integrating interactive channels into the rest of the marketing mix. Specific subjects addressed in Shar's research include email marketing, online advertising, search engine marketing, ad serving and targeting, interactive budgeting and forecasts, and interactive marketing organizational models.
Shar returned to Forrester in 2004 after several years away working in marketing consulting. Shar served as research director for marketing research boutique, TideWatch, where she led internal strategy efforts and client strategy projects. Shar was also a consultant with Carlson Marketing Group's Business Strategy Consulting team, developing CRM and email programs for clients including British Airways, Buena Vista Home Entertainment, and Home Depot. Shar began her career at Forrester in 1997 during the early days of the Internet and has written research on customer loyalty, ad networks, and marketing measurement and planning.
A popular speaker, Shar has been seen on stage at ad:tech, MITX, DMA, and the Email Service Provider Coalition events, among others. She is on the board of SEMPO — the search engine marketing professionals organization — and is also widely quoted in the press including such media outlets as BusinessWeek, Fortune, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal and is a frequent guest on CNBC and National Public Radio.
Shar is a graduate of Harvard University.
Best Practices From Firms That Created Experiences With CARS Attributes
Forrester believes that four attributes will characterize the next phase of development of the web. Online experiences will be: customized by the end user, aggregated at the point of use, relevant to...

Landscape: The Open Innovation Playbook
According to our most recent survey of product strategy professionals, 62% of all companies are not using social media to interact directly with their customers in order to influence product...
Lessons In Product Innovation From A Leader In Co-Creation
Ask someone to name a company that embraces co-creation, and, sooner or later, you will hear "Lego." The Lego Group has been pursuing customer-led innovation for more than a decade, and it hasn't...
Innovation Must Be Deliberate, Distributed, And Demonstrable
Marketing innovation is a business priority. But not all marketing leaders are meeting the challenge despite executive interest. CMOs who are better at driving their organizations are doing so by...
Don't Let Intellectual Property Concerns Hold Back Social Co-Creation
A groundswell of innovation has occurred around the use of social tools for the creation and improvement of consumer products. A number of large and influential companies have embraced the...
How Firms Can Best Capitalize On Software Development And Configuration Opportunities In India
The continued economic viability of software development in India, whether by independent software vendors (ISVs) or "captive" business units, depends less on pure labor arbitrage and more on...

At Each End Of The Innovation Process, You Need A Different Kind Of Lab
In the technology industry, two types of labs exist, each contributing to different parts of the innovation process. The stereotypical lab, focused on pure research, is the source of good ideas from...
Use Serious Games To Generate New Insights About Your Customer
One of the most popular uses for serious games is requirements collection. Serious games change the rules for conversations about requirements, engaging stakeholders in a new (and, yes, fun) way. By...
Forrester's 2011 Tech Industry Predictions
In this report, we highlight macro trends and specific predictions that indicate the directions of growth and disruption for the technology industry in 2011.
Innovation Infrastructure Empowers Product Strategists' Success
Product strategists from software, media, finance, healthcare, and other industries can learn from the example of Intuit. Intuit's culture of innovation — including unstructured "white space"...
War Games Help Top Leaders Build Better Strategies
An increasing number of application development teams are using serious games to make better decisions about their work. Where other new techniques, such as Agile, have helped teams work better,...
How To Innovate Your Products Before Someone Else Does
Digital disruption is about to tear down and rebuild every product in every industry. Thanks to digital platforms, your customers live in a world of heightened expectations and abundant options; they...

To Maximize Revenue, Product Strategists Must Transcend Analog Replicas
Despite minimal pick-up in e-textbook products thus far, publishers know that their historical business models are at risk. Disruptive markets, such as used and rental books, are emerging in response...