Defined B2C marketing processes alleviate pain across the marketing function and increase marketing’s ability to deliver value to internal stakeholders and external consumers and customers. The Forrester Process Chain Framework identifies seven categories of processes: strategize, plan, design, build, deploy, measure, and optimize. This report details each category and visualizes the sequencing and intersection of marketing processes across the process chain, allowing marketers to pinpoint and begin formalizing their own marketing processes.

AI agents promise to easily automate and accelerate marketing use cases, capturing marketers’ attention: 42% of B2C marketing decision-makers in Forrester’s Marketing Survey, 2026 say their organizations are currently piloting or experimenting with agentic AI. In Forrester’s Digital Business And Strategy Survey, 2025 , 49% of B2B or B2B2C marketing digital business strategy decision-makers are investing in AI agents. As AI agents proliferate across vendors’ product offerings, Forrester’s Marketing AI Agent Solution Evaluation Template can help martech decision-makers discern emerging agent validity and suitability for their requirements.

Every year, the arrival of spring brings open windows and blossoming trees. For many, it’s also time for spring cleaning. Whether you love or hate the spring-clean, it’s an important ritual in ushering in the warmer seasons. This year, we recommend extending your spring cleaning ritual to your company’s customer data for consumer personalization programs. […]

If strategy is the blueprint for consumer personalization execution, then data is the fuel. Yet data is a top challenge discussed in personalization programs. Organizations grapple with a myriad of data challenges including siloed data, poor data quality, and missing data. Six dimensions of consumer and customer data shape a personalized tactic: data category, type, level, structure, frequency, and source. This report provides a guide to consumer and customer data for personalization programs and provides organizations with a checklist for critical data questions.

Consumer personalization programs require a methodical approach from vision to execution. Data is a critical pillar in execution because it provides the context needed to create a personalized tactic and determines how you’ll deliver it. Use this tool to inventory the consumer and customer data you need for your personalization tactics against six dimensions: data category, type, level, frequency, structure, and source. Then determine which data types are ready to use based on six evaluation criteria: accessibility, relevance, quality, compliance, data matching, and timeliness. The data readiness results will help you prioritize personalization programs.

Consumer personalization programs require a methodical approach from vision to execution. After establishing an organizationwide personalization vision, the next step is to craft your personalization strategy by detailing a customer need, business objective, tactic(s), and KPI(s). Use this template to draft a personalization strategy plan on a page, which will help you focus your execution on the customer first.

Before diving into agentic commerce, take stock of four lessons that social commerce taught us to make wise decisions today.

Many organizations hit the ground running with consumer “personalization” because it’s built into business priorities or it’s a top-down mandate. But starting with execution and then backing into customer insight and vision mistakenly prioritizes business needs over customer needs. Forrester’s Consumer Personalization Maturity Assessment enables consumer-facing organizations to gauge their current maturity level and identifies areas where organizations can better prepare for designing and executing impactful consumer personalization programs.

Marketers need to carefully implement marketing operations management solutions (MOMSes) to realize their many operational benefits. The scope of an organization’s MOMS requirements can span financial planning and budgeting, project management and workload planning, content and asset planning and production, and marketing performance analytics — and implementation teams require specific considerations against each of those functional categories. B2C and B2B marketing teams should use this checklist to plan for a successful MOMS deployment and track the progress of their implementations.

With that love/hate Valentine’s holiday around the corner, retail America tells us it’s time to let the people in your life know you care about them. Valentine’s Day gift staples like flowers or chocolate may be the standard. But gift-givers who assume that their loved ones want these commonplace offerings may end up falling flat. […]