Don’t stop spending to become more customer obsessed no matter how tight your budgets are. Forrester’s calculations show that cutting funding for efforts critical to customer obsession — like setting up a customer insights function, trialing emerging technology, building a voice-of-the-customer (VoC) program, and coaching teams — can cost up to $862 million depending on your customer and company type. Use this research to calculate the risk associated with defunding customer obsession.

A clear business case makes it easier to justify spend on an enterprisewide transformation like customer obsession. With this in mind, we built a traditional ROI model — but with a twist. We calculated the losses that businesses will incur when they stop funding customer obsession and forecasted the gains expected from continued investment. Cutting funding for efforts critical to customer obsession can cost your business up to $862 million, depending on your customer and company type. Use this tool to calculate your company’s unique risk associated with defunding customer obsession.

The combination of hot takes, social media, and divisive partisanship has proliferated cancel culture across society and especially in the US. Anyone and anything can now be “cancelled” in the court of public opinion. And that includes brands. The good news? Forrester finds the impact of cancel culture on brands is nominal — affecting people more than companies. This report helps B2C marketing executives bolster their brands’ resiliency to weather the inevitable realities of cancel culture.

Answers to a few common questions that we hear from clients around constructing financial models and common ways in how Forrester approaches modeling them.

Marketing professionals struggle to articulate the value of an omnichannel approach to advertising because of the level of commitment required and the difficulty directly attributing financial success. Senior stakeholders demand clear business outcomes to justify the necessary reorganization of marketing teams and partners. This report and accompanying tool make use of Forrester’s Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) framework to help B2C marketers structure a quantifiable business case for moving to an omnichannel approach to advertising.

Investing in customer obsession should yield at least a 700% ROI over 12 years, depending on your company and customer type. In this report, Forrester provides a calculator to determine how to achieve the benefits of customer obsession profitably.

For at least 60 years, efficiency improvements have been one of the major sources of business value from technology. Improved efficiency in processes and activities translates into improved productivity and thus lower costs and higher profit margins. But improving efficiency and productivity is not the only — or even the best — way that technology delivers business value. Instead, we think the proper way to value technology is to focus on how it helps achieve better outcomes. If efficiency involves reducing waste in inputs (e.g., costs), effectiveness involves reducing waste in outcomes (e.g., subpar revenues or costly disruptions). In this report, we explain why effectiveness is a critical metric of tech’s business value and how you can successfully measure it.