For CMO Professionals

REPORT: Brand Management For A New Age: Experience And Resonance Transform Brand Leadership

Vision: The Brand Experience Playbook

November 9, 2016 Dipanjan Chatterjee, Sheryl Pattek

In the age of the customer, CMOs battle to build their brands with distracted, technology-empowered consumers who have as much to say about what the brand stands for as the company does. CMOs must lead an enterprisewide shift from a company-centric, top-down branding mindset to a customer-centric view that creates an emotionally resonant brand experience that transcends product and service transactions. This report establishes a vision for CMOs to lead brand development and management. This is an update of a previously published report; Forrester reviews and revises it periodically for continued relevance and accuracy.

For CMO Professionals

REPORT: Chart A New Course For A Connected Brand Experience

August 17, 2015 Sheryl Pattek

As brand and customer experience become intertwined, brand building must move beyond the purview of just the marketing department to become an organizationwide effort. To respond, CMOs require a strategic plan to lead the brand experience that will 1) pinpoint the brand North Star; 2) navigate the brand experience with the brand compass to build a trusted, remarkable, unmistakable, and essential (TRUE) brand; and 3) create a new map of the brand experience that aligns messages, actions, and products or services (MAP). This is an update of a previously published report; Forrester reviews and updates it periodically for continued relevance and accuracy.

For CIO Professionals

REPORT: The Operating Model For Customer Obsession

November 3, 2015 Sharyn Leaver, Michelle Moorehead, Sheryl Pattek

We know and have proven that a better customer experience correlates with higher revenue growth. But what does it take to succeed in your quest for the level of customer obsession needed to drive these results? To find out, we analyzed the practices of over 30 companies at various stages in their customer-obsessed transformations. Through in-depth discussions with C-level executives at each of these firms, we teased out the common core for success. This report details the fundamental reset of day-to-day operations required to drive customer obsession.

For CMO Professionals

REPORT: Rethink Marketing In The Customer's Context

How B2B Marketers Need To Recast Their Approach

May 27, 2014 Sheryl Pattek

Business-to-business (B2B) marketers must face a new reality: Customers seek a range of inputs as they embark on solving business needs. Some executives prefer vendors that can create and deliver on a vision, and they want to educate themselves through professional and peer-created content that is available online. Other buyers are comfortable doing research on their own before contacting sales. Customers' control over their decision-making forces B2B marketers to put the customer life cycle at the center of their marketing efforts, capturing customers before and after they seek out help for an issue they face. This report is an update to "Rethink Marketing In The Buyer's Context," originally published on February 21, 2103, which defined the framework for understanding the relevance of the customer journey to your business and provided a road map for navigating the full customer life cycle, before, during, and after the sale.

For CMO Professionals

REPORT: Evaluate Marketing's Customer Life-Cycle Maturity

Assessment: The Customer Life-Cycle Marketing Playbook

July 17, 2015 Sheryl Pattek

The world your customers live in is complex — a maze of media, devices, conversations, and interactions. Making a connection between your customers and your brand means finding new ways to stand out to the right audience with the right message at the right time. Whether you are a business-to-business (B2B) or a business-to-consumer (B2C) enterprise, marketing has to facilitate that complex engagement across the customer life cycle, from customers initially identifying a need to researching their options, making a purchase, and using the product. But, marketing can't stop there. In today's post-digital world, marketers must ultimately deploy strategies to keep the customer engaged throughout the entire life cycle. To create and manage customer relationships, CMOs need to ready marketing across five key areas: strategy, organization, measurement, data and analytics, and marketing technology. This report offers CMOs an assessment tool with which to evaluate the current state of their marketing team and plan for true customer life-cycle marketing success. This is an update of a previously published report; Forrester factored in new criteria and scoring to the assessment tool.