The term “customer engagement” is seemingly ubiquitous today’s marketing world. The Advertising Research Foundation came up with this as the first real “definition” of the term customer engagement:  "Engagement is turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context." So let me start by offering a new definition: “Customer engagement is the science of optimizing the relationship between consumer behavior and a company’s objectives to produce the most profitable outcome”.  The correct answer would be both all or none of the above. Come again? MORE >>

Quaero built a framework to help CI professionals assess their Customer Intelligence maturity across six key dimensions - strategy, process, organization, technology, data, measurement -  to determine where they have gaps and areas of focus. To learn more about the Six Dimensions - particularly as they relate to digital, check out Embracing Digital Customer Interaction by our Change Management guru, Niall Budds. Successful Customer Intelligence: Permeates an organization - from short-term, immediate objectives to long range planning. Exabytes.as in 18 zeros.  MORE >>

If you didn’t attend the Forrester Customer Intelligence Forum held in Los Angeles on April 18 th and 19 th , you missed a great chance to hear William Band define the marketing technology roadmap.  Do you already have a planning process and marketing technology roadmap that incorporates Forrester’s guidance? The good news is you can get an overview from Band’s blog on the Forrester website.  I’ll summarize a few points here that aren’t covered directly in his blog. At the conference, Band discussed leveraging swim lanes for planning.  MORE >>

His humor and candor is endearing, but Andrew Mason’s comment puzzled me, “My biggest regrets are the moments that I let a lack of data override my intuition on what’s best for our customers.”. In today’s world of big data, and the technology to process every click, view, open, impression, tag, etc. He needed experts to evaluate the petabytes of data available to Groupon to improve the customer experience. I recently re-visited my StrengthFinder profile. One of my strengths is Strategic. It is not a skill that can be taught. He needed earthworms. friend of man MORE >>

When we develop our communications and think about how to message to our prospects and customers, B2B marketers have a tendancy to get caught up in features and functionality. Do you know what social media sites your target customers visit with regularity? Start with a customer survey; get engaged with new clients early in the onboarding process and ask these questions. Last week, I had the benefit if attending the MarketingProfs B2B Forum here in Boston. As I spend time looking through my notes and action items, there are a few key themes that I am taking away. MORE >>