Three Emotional Territories That Winning Brands Get Right

Sell, Sell, Sell? Up-selling and cross-selling are extremely popular activities to boost profit margins. In my many years of consulting with financial services organizations, I have seen various shades of getting customers to buy up and buy into an ass…

A Lesson from the Bruce Springsteen/Richard Thaler School of Marketing

What do consumers, Bruce Springsteen, and a Nobel Prize laureate have in common? They all understand the concept of fairness. And they understand that consumers reward and punish companies based on perceived fairness. Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler …

CXEurope 2017: Introducing the Values Based Customer

More than 5 years ago Forrester introduced the Age of Customer as a new 15 to 20 years era which saw the increasing customer empowerment in front of brands and companies. For companies, the first step in this era turned into improving the customer experience and the customer journey through an omnichannel strategy,  identifying the […]

Emotion and the B2B brand experience

If I asked you for a list brands that might air a commercial during the Super Bowl, you’d probably include a brand like Pepsi, perhaps a Tom Brady-endorsed Foot Locker, or yet another mega consumer brand. Turns out that during the 2017 sporting event, B2B brands produced some of the most-talked-about commercials. Tom Brady put […]

Another Mobile Feature Banks Should Offer: Subscription Management

[this blog post was co-authored by Michael Chirokas] A year ago, Forrester published a report that listed Eleven Mobile Features That More Banks Should Offer. Unsurprisingly, our ongoing research continues to uncover new mobile services that belong on banks’ road maps. Recently, we came across another feature that several startups offer but that we haven’t seen […]

Drive Creativity And CX Innovation With Employee Empathy

The Case For Customer Empathy… Hubspot’s INBOUND 2017 slogan emphasized “Empathy.” My expectation: it would make the case to the 21,000 people in attendance that customer empathy is critical to their engagement efforts. I was for it — it’s something my research focuses on, and is something we in the CX and UX field try […]

Luxury Brands Must Act Or Be Digitally Disenfranchised From Savvy Luxury Consumers

Luxury consumers around the world are embracing new technology and adding these digital touchpoints – including, of course, their smartphones – into their shopping behaviors. But overall, luxury brands have been far too slow to respond to their customers’ rising digital expectations. Luxury brands, tier one through to aspirational, are now scrambling to bolster their […]

The Global Digital Marketing Gap

Over the past few years, I was lucky enough to travel to many different places: in most European countries, in the US, in Brazil, in the Middle East, in India, in Indonesia or very recently in Japan and Thailand. The digital revolution is happening all over the place and it is fascinating to see how […]

Brand 2020: Act 2. Soul-Searching

A MANIFESTO IN THREE ACTS Summer is a good time for reflection. At this time of the year, many take a week or two away from the crush of meetings and deadlines to spend time with friends, family, and to dwell in the clarity beyond the grind. I spent some of this time thinking about […]

Brand 2020: A Manifesto In Three Acts – Act I. Crisis

THE MANIFESTO Summer is a good time for reflection. At this time of the year, many take a week or two away from the crush of meetings and deadlines to spend time with friends, family, and to dwell in the clarity beyond the grind. I spent some of this time thinking about how the work […]

The Data Digest: Empowered Customers Paint Their Own Future

Microsoft Paint would have died a slow, quiet death if it hadn’t been for this week’s swell of voices on social media advocating for its revival. On Wednesday, Microsoft issued a press release announcing that it wouldn’t discontinue the Paint app in the wake of users’ “outpouring of support and nostalgia” for the product. Microsoft’s […]

Interruptions To The Advertising Market

The advertising headwinds have been gathering. The $7.4B lost to bad ads. The chronic underperformance. Major firms pulling millions from media budgets. Consumers actively avoiding ads. And yet the interruptions continue. There are bright spots: great storytelling from some brands, better channel orchestration, and the pragmatic application of programmatic. Advertising fueled the remarkable rise of […]