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This blog post is part of Forrester’s Holiday 2018 retail series. With Black Friday less than a month away, it’s only a matter of time before holiday promotional activity reaches a fever pitch. But for many consumers, the holiday shopping season brings with it an intense mix of emotions. For some, it’s their favorite time […]

In the spirit of Halloween, I’m going to write about the bogeyman of almost every industry out there: GAFA. In the last few years, I have answered many versions of the same question: what will Google (insert Apple/Facebook/Amazon) do to us (insert financial services/healthcare/retail/media)? This fear is grounded in some reality. All four firms are […]

“Love and marriage, love and marriage They go together like a horse and carriage This I tell you, brother You can’t have one without the other” – Frank Sinatra The New Yorker once wrote of Sinatra that “he sounds the way you would sound if you could speak the things you feel.” In my line […]

As our research has shown, most companies today have pretty immature innovation efforts, and one of the biggest holdbacks is their corporate culture. Sadly, most humans fear change, and thus this mentality can keep you from being a driver of market shifts. And overcoming this issue can take years. Want to go faster? Focus first […]

There is ample evidence that improving employee experience leads to better business results. Briefly, firms that improve employee experience find that they get better work performance and more discretionary effort from employees.[i] Discretionary effort makes companies more effective and efficient, according to this study published in Harvard Business Review.[ii] Better employee experience also leads to lower employee turnover […]

Your organization faces two powerful trends: The growing pressure of regulatory requirements on data protection that are emerging worldwide. The increasing awareness of privacy rights, which causes customers to take action in their relationship with businesses. You can choose to focus on compliance at the minimum possible cost, playing catch-up with regulators while delivering mediocre […]

Sending malicious payloads and packets is no longer the standard in threat operations. In today’s world of massive social media presence and influence, malicious actors can bring an organization to its knees — 280 characters at a time. This isn’t an attack on your infrastructure but an attack of computational propaganda aimed to shape a divisive […]

Data governance is good for you, they said. Data governance de-risks your business, they said. Data should be owned by the business, they said. How’s that working for you? It’s my guess that data governance is not — quite — working for you. Sure, in pockets you’ve managed to satisfy regulatory imperatives like GDPR and may even […]

When your CEO asks you for your digital strategy, you could go away and huddle up with your team for a month and produce some voluminous document full of TLAs, only to have it sit on the shelf for the next two years. Instead, simply give your CEO a copy of your business strategy. After […]

This blog post is part of Forrester’s Holiday 2018 retail series. Online holiday shopping in the US is set to grow to $151 billion this year, up 14% from $133 billion in 2017. Total holiday sales will grow at a more conservative 1.7%. All told, we see approximately one-fifth of all US holiday shopping this […]

This blog post is part of Forrester’s Holiday 2018 retail series. Despite news of brands such as Nike, Adidas, Allbirds, and SeatGeek successfully selling on social networks, social media is still not a place that consumers buy products and services. Our Forrester Social Technographics® data uncovers that consumers use social media least in the buy stage of […]

It may not seem like it yet, but climate change is altering the world so drastically that all enterprises will need to undergo a transformation to avoid going extinct. Earlier this week, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported (with high confidence) that at the rate we’re going, global warming of 1.5°C is likely […]

You’re an executive, an employer, or maybe an up-and-comer in your organization, but either way, you have surveyed the moment and you know that big things are poised to happen. Unlike the big things of the past — the internet or mobile — the change won’t be the result of consumers embracing a shiny new object or buying into a […]

Picture the following: You wake up from a fitful night of sleep feeling under the weather. From your sickbed, a voice assistant gathers your symptoms, accesses your patient history, and orders a prescription for you. But you want to talk to a human as well, so you initiate a video chat with your physician using […]

Facebook Loses More User Data (This Time Unintentionally) Facebook announced that it experienced a breach this week that lost 50 million users’ data. Ironically, the breach happened in part due to exploited bugs in three features developed to give users more control over their privacy. Some quick key lessons to take away from this breach: […]

Unless you were on the Appalachian Trail for a few weeks, you know what I’m talking about. I’ll start with this paragraph from our newly published analysis of Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign featuring Colin Kaepernick, called “Nike Makes No Sacrifices“: Judging Nike’s decision is difficult because there’s so much conflicting evidence. In concept, values-based appeals […]

I am still catching my breath. Adobe has agreed to acquire Marketo for $4.75 billion. The deal is the biggest in Adobe’s history and a massive encore to the acquisition of Magento for a mere $1.7 billion in May. On the one hand, I find myself proud to be a B2B marketer — to think that […]

So where are all the GDPR enforcement actions? The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) entered into force at the end of May 2018, giving unprecedented powers to regulators. From ongoing regulatory audits to hefty fines and a range of new privacy requirements, the GDPR is the most dramatic change in data protection and governance in the last 20 years. Some […]

Autonomous payments is the future state of payments — and banks, merchants, and payment vendors need to prepare now. Venture funding in this arena already exceeds $28 billion. Coupled with intensifying economic and political forces, consumers globally will see this new but nonlinear evolution of payments emerge, where payments will melt into the wider commerce experience […]