Many marketers fail to meaningfully differentiate their customer experience strategy from that of their competitors. Effective “experience identities” provide direction to Marketing as well as cross-functional stakeholders when making decisions that affect the customer experience – they serve as heuristics of sorts when precise guidelines aren’t available. You’ll learn how to identify critical aspects of the customer experience, and how to recognize the role of experience identity in prioritizing marketing investments. MORE >>

A lot of folks have made New Year’s resolutions to stay more on top of developments in marketing and related fields – I know I have. In general, I think marketers intellectually know that consumers are not rational and will often make unexpected choices, but our models often assume a rational or quasi-rational consumer. The book teaches executives how to implement a Challenger sales strategy in their organization, and even includes great information on how marketers can help enable Challenger selling. The Filter Bubble. Steve Jobs. The Challenger Sale. MORE >>

A marketer at a member company recently summed up his current situation as follows: “We’re awash in data, but short on information.”  A recent Unica survey found “measurement, analysis, and learning” was marketers’ top bottleneck and “turning data into action” as their top organizational issue.  This data supernova presents obvious issues for CIOs and CTOs dealing with server capacity and security protocols, but it also clearly impacts marketers struggling to plug into and make sense of the right data streams in order to infuse decision-making with fact-based evidence. MORE >>

Marketing’s a complicated business, and, as such, it’s easy to tell ourselves lies – whether we know it or not. We talk to marketers every day, and here are some of the biggest, most persuasive whoppers in the bunch. Consumer brands can use their knowledge of the market to guide customers to better decisions, and business brands can leverage industry expertise to help business purchasers get the job done. 4) Having more data to make decisions will remove the subjectivity from marketing. Got more? Let us know in comments! Customers (and consumers!) MORE >>

That statistic comes from comprehensive research on B2B buying and content marketing that we here at CEB have just completed.  The findings suggest the environment is even tougher than most marketers fully realized.  Enter: content marketing.  The promise of content marketing is that if I can look smart enough and be helpful enough to customers with my content, I’ll get their attention, trust and maybe even their affinity.  In other words, content marketing can generate demand. Here’s where marketing automation comes to the rescue!  Or does it? MORE >>