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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.
Processes: The Mobile Banking Strategy Playbook
The critical question for many digital banking teams after they build mobile banking is how to encourage customer adoption and use. Forrester spoke to eBusiness executives at banks about the current...
Tools And Technologies: The Mobile Banking Strategy Playbook
Even the best mobile strategy can be a victim of poor execution. Managing technology is hard enough, but as new phone features and capabilities crop up seemingly every day, navigating the ever...


Landscape: The Digital Customer Experience Improvement Playbook
Are the calculation formulas set properly? I don't see anything change when I enter values in for archetypes in the EA Archetype Assessment tab.
Landscape: The Customer Loyalty Playbook
Consumers join programs of brands they like, but they limit their participation to only a few programs and are motivated by the desire to seek out discounts. Since 2008, consumer attitudes toward...
The 2013 New Year has begun with the removal from the global tech market outlook of one risk, that of the US economy going over the fiscal cliff. On New Year's day, the US House of...
Benchmarks: The Mobile Banking Strategy Playbook
We used our Mobile Banking Functionality Benchmark methodology to evaluate the retail mobile banking offerings of 15 retail banks in in North America, Western Europe, and Australia across more than...
Policy And Procedures: The S&R Practice Playbook
Over recent years, the information security industry has matured nicely; experts and associations have documented many best practice models, and their adoption has been widespread. It's disconcerting...
The Nine Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
Since Forrester published its first Wave™ evaluation on marketing mix modeling in 2011, the market has undergone significant growth and evolution as marketers demand more in-depth, real-time,...
To: Chris Silva Thanks for speaking with us. Your research "WAN Optimization: 4Q09" is also very helpful. We'll stay in touch and follow up as needed. Best regards, Peter Predella, Director of...
Assessment: The Customer Experience Ecosystem Playbook
Customer interactions are shaped by a complex set of interdependencies that Forrester calls the customer experience ecosystem. In order to make significant and long-lasting customer experience...
Oracle makes itself an easy target for the ire of the cloud community when it makes dumb, cloudwashed announcements like last week's supposed IaaS offering. But then again, Oracle is just doing...
Organization: The Business Intelligence Playbook
Earlier-generation business intelligence (BI) support centers — organized along the same lines as support centers for all other enterprise software — fall short when it comes to taking...
During my sullen teenage years my father invented a nonsensical, rhetorical question to proffer when conversation ran dry. During particularly quiet moments he’d ask, “So you want to be a...
The increasing penetration of smartphones among mobile subscribers and booming online retail are driving the adoption of mobile payments in China. It's crucial for infrastructure and operations (I&O)...
A helpful tool. Related to Capability Details, what would be an example of KPI for a business capability vs. KPI for a business goal?
Twenty Solutions For Delivering Differentiated Experiences
Customers demand superior service and support as the price for their ongoing loyalty and patronage, and they are increasingly leveraging the chat channel for customer service. The chat vendor...
And Why Google, Not Facebook, Will Dominate Affinity Marketing
Every day, huge numbers of people tell us what they like by voting for things, talking about things, reviewing things, and engaging in other online social interactions. All these behaviors add up to...

Next week, I will present first results of Forrester’s 2012 global banking platform deals survey. A total of 28 banking platform vendors submitted their 2012 deals for evaluation. One year ago,...
Landscape: The Marketing Mix Optimization Playbook
Marketing mix modeling is no longer just a tool for consumer packaged goods (CPG) marketers to measure the effect of traditional marketing on overall sales. Today, marketing mix modeling can help all...

Forrester conducted an online survey fielded in February 2013 of 4,575 US individuals ages 18 to 88. For results based on a randomly chosen sample of this size (N = 4,575), there is 95% confidence...