We're only a couple weeks away from Forrester's Marketing Forum 2011, April 5-6 in San Francisco, California. (You can view the event details and sign up to attend here). The theme is "Innovating Your Marketing For The Next Digital Decade," which will help attendees navigate the rapidly changing world of digital experiences. Rapid innovation is creating radical shifts in the methods and media that people use to engage with your company, brand, and products. From connected TVs to Microsoft's Xbox Kinect to tablet PCs to mobile-based location awareness, the panoply of emerging platforms and techniques gives powerful new means of creating rich product experiences and engaging with your customers.

For Consumer Product Strategy professionals, we've focused our sessions around a research theme called Total Product Experience. Developed by the amazing James McQuivey, the Total Product Experience thesis is that digital channels are no longer being used just to deliver marketing messages. Instead, they are swiftly being enlisted to simulate and stimulate product trial and use. Already, using Kinect for Xbox, marketers can enable you to kick the virtual tires of a car; tomorrow, with a tablet PC app, marketers will let you take pictures of yourself and dress your own body in virtual clothes. Welcome to the Era of Experience, a time in which product strategists and product marketers must collaborate to deepen the digital customer relationship and extend the total product experience to create value.

We're tracing this theme across three presentations: James will deliver the anchor session, "Product marketers and Product Strategists unite! It’s Time To Build Digital Product experiences." To further develop the concept, the wonderful Julie Ask will focus on mobility with "Creating a Total Mobile Product Experience." And a third key to developing a Total Product Experience is bringing your customers into the creation of the product in the first place. Doug Williams, who has built a huge repertoire of research on Co-Creation, will explore this aspect of the thesis in "How Product Strategists and Marketers Can Collaborate on Co-Creation."

I'm really excited for this event, and hope to see you in San Francisco!  Again, Forrester clients, please contact your account manager, or visit this web site for more event information.