Media Alert

Communication and social apps steal the lion’s share of consumers’ time spent on apps — with a combined 21% of all smartphone minutes. For example, consumers spend 25-plus minutes per day on social networks (primarily Facebook), according to new Forrester data based on a survey of 2,000 US smartphone owners. Music, video, maps, gaming, search, [...]

Nearly 70% of social marketers believe it’s more effective to buy all of their social tools from a single vendor (i.e., a social suite) than to buy social point solutions from several vendors. But so far, this simply hasn’t proven to be an effective strategy, writes Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst Nate Elliott in new [...]

European online cross-border retail sales will top €40 billion by 2018, up from €29 billion this year. This represents an 11% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) according to Forrester’s latest five-year forecast, which defines cross-border buyers as consumers who deliberately buy retail products outside of their domestic market over the Internet. Today, cross-border sales account [...]

Apple will sell more than 10 million Apple Watches and dominate the smartwatch category in 2015. But this only represents 1% of the 2 billion smartphones on the globe. So should marketers even be paying attention to the Apple Watch? The short answer: Yes. Forrester expects Apple Watch to launch the entire wearables category and [...]

CaixaBank takes the top spot in Forrester’s 2015 European mobile banking functionality review — scoring an 86 out of 100 in the evaluation across more than 40 criteria and 13 leading retail banks. CaixaBank stood out for its extensive account management and transactional features, a digital wallet that is integrated into its mobile banking app, [...]

Three-quarters of business leaders agree that improving the customer experience (CX) is their top strategic priority, yet nearly half of CX practitioners acknowledge that their CX programs are focused on measuring and plugging holes in their current experience. Worse, another 30% spend their time trying to prevent bad experiences from happening in the first place. CX [...]

Forty-five percent of B2B marketers find it difficult to attribute specific budget spend to revenue results, according to new Forrester research. Predictive analytics can help and currently represents an untapped opportunity to find and serve B2B buyers, but Forrester advises firms not to get ahead of themselves when considering how to put analytics into action. [...]

Sixty-three percent of US smartphone users are concerned about their privacy and security when they access the Internet via their mobile device. This compares with 56%, 64%, and 58% of UK, French, and Chinese citizens, respectively, according to new Forrester surveys of more than 20,000 online adults. However, the majority of global consumers are either the same [...]

Of the top 50 brands Forrester tracks in its Social WebTrack study, more than half maintain Instagram accounts, posting an average of 5.6 times per week. Engagement rates average 4.21%, compared with .07% on Facebook. Why, then, are marketers unable to analyze visual social content? Most brands suffer from undeveloped visual listening capabilities because they lack [...]

Retailers should stop obsessing over Millennials and instead turn their attention to older generations with greater financial power, writes Forrester’s Sucharita Mulpuru in new research. She argues that many of the opportunities and challenges Millennials present to retailers are overhyped, debunking three common myths that drive retailers’ obsession: 1. Millennials are fundamentally different from other [...]

The stark reality for businesses in the wake of the IRS data breach is that, unlike the IRS, their customers don’t need them. If businesses fail to live up to the trust their customers place in them, customers will simply take their business elsewhere. Forrester writes that security executives need to understand the business logic [...]

Mobile will collapse the separation between editorial and advertising in media, writes Forrester in new research published today. The Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) new standard, which allows brands to make programmatic bids to place their branded content right in the stream of content for media brands, is a nod to the media world of the [...]

Despite its flaws, OpenStack is ready for enterprise use — and well-positioned to join Amazon Web Services, Azure, Google, and VMware’s vCloud Air as one of five public cloud camps that are forming, according to new Forrester research. OpenStack is well suited for application development, but organizations need to be aware of the following 10 [...]

IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP’s recent moves into IoT software has CIOs salivating for an off-the-shelf Internet of Things (IoT) solution. But not so fast, writes Forrester in new research. This is just the first lap in a five-year IoT journey for the big four enterprise software players, and CIOs must be prepared to build, not [...]

The next digital apps platform will be a cornerstone of every business and will bridge four domains: corporate, consumer, commerce, and connected devices. According to Forrester, Microsoft and Google are uniquely positioned now to deliver on all four of these domains. Competitors such as IBM, Oracle, and SAP only have investments in the corporate domain, while [...]

Forrester expects HP to focus on its strengths — private and hybrid cloud — despite its senior VP of Helion product management, Bill Hilf, telling The New York Times that it doesn’t make sense for HP to go against Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and Microsoft. HP is not alone in not having the capabilities to [...]

Vanguard’s explosive early growth with its Personal Advisor Services — $13.1 billion in assets under management in six months — suggests that the service will be a transformative offering, writes Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst Bill Doyle in new research evaluating the product. Personal Advisor fills needs that have thus far only been met by [...]

Cambridge, Mass., April 29, 2015 . . . Forrester Research, Inc. (Nasdaq: FORR) today announced its 2015 first-quarter financial results. First-Quarter Financial Performance Total revenues were $75.2 million for the first quarter of 2015, compared with $73.1 million for the first quarter of 2014. Research revenues increased 2%, and advisory services and events revenues increased [...]

Europay, MasterCard, Visa (EMV) chip-based cards have been the norm in Europe and in Asia for about a decade, but plastic EMV will not achieve broad adoption in the US until 2020, writes Forrester in new research. Despite the looming deadlines to move from magnetic stripe to EMV, adoption will be slow, thanks to strong [...]