To build the business case for marketing technology (martech) investments, B2C marketing executives must engage relevant stakeholders to understand the business and technology requirements that underpin marketing priorities. They must also uncover technology, process, and skills dependencies to ensure the success of martech investments. This report provides five steps to guide B2C marketers when conducting a gap analysis during the analyze stage of the B2C Marketing Technology Alignment Framework.

B2C marketing executives can use the Forrester B2C Marketing Technology Gap Analysis Tool to engage relevant stakeholders to understand the business and technology requirements that underpin marketing priorities. Use this tool to uncover technology, process, and skills dependencies to ensure the success of marketing technology (martech) investments. You can then view the results of the gap analysis based on the importance of business requirements and initial proposals to address them.

Forrester’s total experience growth grid shows how effectively a brand acquires customers and retains them by connecting brand promise with customer experience. This report helps business leaders use the growth grid to diagnose the experience gaps that constrain growth, understand the category-specific dynamics behind their position, and identify the strategies most likely to improve acquisition, retention, and long-term revenue growth.

Forrester’s Supply Chain Technology Inventory And Assessment Tool allows technology architecture leaders to identify each technology type that their organization uses for supply chain operations and understand its associated characteristics and costs, functionality against requirements, and user adoption. Leaders can then review their spending across vendors and products by budget owner, user group, or customer factors. The assessment tool also provides investment recommendations based on user inputs related to functionality and adoption.

B2C marketers require an increasingly broad range of technologies to enable and support them to win, serve, and retain customers. Such investments represent a significant cost, and many fail to achieve their desired benefits or expected ROI. B2C marketing executives can derive more value from their martech spend by using the Forrester B2C Marketing Technology Inventory And Assessment Tool to evaluate their organization’s current technologies. In this report, we describe how to use the technology assessment’s prioritization framework to identify and prioritize technology improvements.

Forrester examined 24 CPG brands across the digital attributes that matter most for go-to-market success. For the e-commerce dimension, we reviewed direct-to-consumer buyability and Amazon storefront presence.

This role profile provides a job description and competencies for creative technologists. AI-integrated advertising requires organizations to tie creative and media processes and data together. Creative technologists are accountable for that. This role is responsible for resolving bottlenecks and getting creative directors hooked onto performance marketers’ KPIs. Successful creative technologists span functions, channels, and stages of the funnel. They help brands build the new muscle needed as ad creative becomes critical to brands’ growth.

We analyzed 24 CPG brands across the digital attributes that matter most. Social media is a critical part of the consumer discovery journey, particularly as younger consumers use social platforms not only for inspiration and research but also to buy products.

As consumers increasingly turn to answer engines to research products, brands must ensure that their content is visible in AI-powered experiences.

Forrester’s Digital Go-To-Market (GTM) Review evaluates brands across the attributes essential to their long-term digital success, focusing on the strength of their direct-to-consumer (DTC) operations. In this research, brands are primarily B2C companies that manufacture their own products and generally distribute via wholesale partners. In this series, we uncover the results of Forrester’s Digital GTM Review for brand categories, highlight best practices, and identify key findings for digital leaders of brands who sell consumer packaged goods (CPG), which are also known as fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) brands.