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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.
Communicating The Right Data To Different Internal Stakeholders
Social media contributes value to interactive marketing programs in many ways — but measuring that value is difficult. The sheer volume of social media metrics can quickly become overwhelming...

Integrating Customer Data Is Vital, But It's Not The End Goal
We recently surveyed 137 Customer Intelligence (CI) professionals about their use of analytical applications and priorities. Users are investing in solutions that transform insight into action, but a...

Road Map: The Marketing Mix Optimization Playbook
Marketing mix optimization (MMO) has become an indispensable discipline for marketing leaders because it helps in effectively allocating marketing budgets across an increasingly fragmented media and...
Business Case: The Marketing Mix Optimization Playbook
Marketing mix modeling is a powerful tool that provides a holistic understanding of marketing performance across channels. With marketing mix modeling, marketers can positively affect business...
Landscape: The Mobile eBusiness Playbook
With more than 1 billion smartphones in consumers' pockets at the beginning of 2013, mobile is driving a second Internet revolution that's even more profound than the first one. Mobile creates new...

Customer Intelligence Professionals Need Mobile Analytic Tactics
Consumers will adopt and use convenient services and products. On mobile phones, this means services that offer immediacy and simplicity through a highly contextual experience. Context — the...
CCP Games, a massive multiplayer online game provider, knew that its existing approach with key channels like display was suboptimized and that it could drive more efficient customer acquisition if...
Use Technology To Move From Experimentation To Driving Results
In 2012, CMOs will need to embrace technology to help them handle big issues like: 1) addressing the maturation of social media from cool tool to critical connector with customers; 2) determining how...

Continuous Improvement: The Customer Loyalty Playbook
Successful loyalty programs offer a boost to customer retention, customer satisfaction, and the bottom line. But today, many programs fail to reach success because they haven't mastered even basic...
Vision: The Cross-Channel Attribution Playbook
Today's customers interact with brands via a wide variety of touchpoints and at different stages of the brand life cycle. But companies measure campaign success using last-touch methods that fail to...
Findings From Forrester's Q4 2010 Survey Of Customer Intelligence Professionals
Forrester recently surveyed 137 Customer Intelligence professionals to understand their marketing technology priorities, plans, and budgets. Old issues continue to fester — a lack of a...

The online marketing suite supports many of the priorities that customer insights (CI) professionals hold dear: customer centricity, cost efficiency, measurement, and marketing relevance. But...

Continuous Improvement: The Social Intelligence Playbook
If you represent a large consumer brand, consider a social intelligence command center — a dedicated resource for listening to the groundswell. A command center like this can improve your...
Customer Intelligence (CI) professionals should constantly evaluate their need for next-generation marketing measurement processes, including cross-channel attribution. Successfully implementing...
Road Map: The Digital Media Buying Playbook
This report outlines the road map portion of Forrester's solution for interactive marketing executives working on digital media buying. Moving to a higher level of digital media buying maturity...
Poorly Used Auto DMs Decrease Affinity And Engagement On Twitter
The ability to send automatic direct messages (auto DMs) to new followers is not built into the Twitter platform, and for good reason. While some brands and people use third-party tools to send auto...
Assessment: The Marketing Mix Optimization Playbook
To ensure continued success in this age of increasingly fragmenting audiences and multiplying communication platforms, marketers need to adapt their strategies and tactics to optimally allocate their...
Road Map: The Social Intelligence Playbook
Too many companies remain trapped by merely monitoring or passively collecting social media. Few actually reach social intelligence: driving their marketing and business strategy using the data that...
Findings From Forrester's Q4 2010 Customer Intelligence Survey
Forrester surveyed 52 European customer intelligence (CI) professionals in Q4 2010 about their technology adoption plans. This report drills into the technology adoption trends of our European...
Performance Management: The Lead-To-Revenue Playbook
The seminal idea behind lead-to-revenue management (L2RM) was the need to calibrate marketing's activities (and budget) to the result of revenue generation. But effective performance management of...

Assessment: The Digital Media Buying Playbook
Marketers fall into four categories of digital media buying maturity, based on their strength across their organization, planning and execution, measurement, and technology. This report of the...

Using Cross-Channel Attribution To Understand Marketing Effectiveness
In an environment where media fragmentation is the status quo, traditional one-to-one, last-touch methods of allocating demand to marketing efforts are outdated and lead to a suboptimal marketing...