Blog: customer intelligence

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Upcoming Webinar - Top Trends in Customer Intelligence

Feb 9 2012

I hope you will join me and Fatemeh Khatibloo, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research on February 28th at 1pm ET, for an informative webinar to introduce Fatemeh's newest research on Customer Intelligence (CI) Services. Webinar Image

We'll discuss the challenges CI professionals face as their business becomes increasingly more complicated and Fatemeh will share the four key trends - Indemnification, Engagement Selectivity, Risk & Revenue Sharing and Marketing Safe Havens - that will change the way CI professionals evaluate and select vendors.

I hope you'll join us for this exciting event. Expect a lively discussion and some great insights you won't want to miss. Click here to register for the Top Trends in Customer Intelligence Webinar.

Also, all attendees will receive Quaero's Client Readiness checklist, a great tool to help you assess readiness - everything from change management to a comprehensive data audit and inventory - as you embark upon your own marketing database initiative.

A Marketing Reflection: Quaero's 2011 Webinar Recap

Dec 22 2011

Here at Quaero, it's a magical time of the year. Using up last vacation days, attending company holiday parties, and of course, planning for 2012 marketing efforts. A whole new collection of events, webinars, eBooks, etc. that we will be rolling out in the coming year. As we plan, however, we don't want to forget the success of 2011, because we were fortunate to work with some fantastic people, and create a good deal of content that we trust will live far beyond the new year. For this reason, I thought it would be nice to recap some of our 2011 webinars, and the lessons that we learned from them. Thank you to our friends at Neolane, who gave us the idea with a recap of their own.

Numbers That Make Marketers Tremble

Dec 2 2011

At recent events like AdTech and in conversations with clients, I've heard a staggering number of statistics that would make even the most sane marketer's head spin:

There are 800 million people on Facebook.
Human beings generate 200 EXABYTES (read: 18 zeros!) of information each year.(1)
42 hours of content is uploaded to YouTube... Every minute.
178.5 million people will browse online before they ever make a purchase.(2)

Are you scared yet? I certainly am. These numbers tell us a great deal about how consumers - people - get, consume, and utilize information.

From B2B & B2C, to B2Me

Sep 29 2011

Marketing strategies to survive and thrive in today’s highly dynamic business environment.

By Jim Lewis

Part 1: Today’s Environment

In order to be successful selling to businesses, it is important to recognize the role of the individual. It is all too easy to lose sight of the fact that organizations – from small businesses to global corporations – are comprised of groups of people with not much more in common than the shared enterprise called “work” that brings them together 40 or so hours each week. Allowing for 8 hours of sleep each night, there remains 112 waking hours each week to devote to things other than work. How we fill our non-working waking hours provides important clues to what motivates, inspires, and defines us as people.

Whereas the workplace used to be the primary location that cutting edge technology was encountered, decades of increasing power and miniaturization and decreasing cost have driven highly sophisticated technologies into every facet of life – extending far beyond the workplace, to virtually every place an individual spends their time. Experiences online and increasingly offline include an information-driven component that is tailored to an individual’s preferences. As a result, we expect a level of customization commensurate with our history of visiting and interacting with people, places and things of interest.

What are the implications of this pervasive, highly personalized world of information in the context of business-to-business marketing?

Are Communication Service Providers Really Ready for the Future?

Aug 30 2011

The media world has been and continues to undergo dramatic shifts as content continues to be delivered and consumed in myriad ways. A recent McKinsey Quarterly paper highlights the dramatic increase in the intensity with which people use digital devices and platforms. Approximately 50% of online consumers are now advanced users of smart phones, social networks and other tools such as tablets, up from 32% just two years ago.

ESPN: Maximizing Audience Data to Drive Revenue Growth

Mar 17 2011

We ESPN have partnered with ESPN for over four years to build a Fan Relationship Marketing (FRM) capability and culture within the organization. What does this mean to them? It means maximizing audience data to drive revenue growth for the benefit of marketing, ad sales, and editorial. That's a tidy little sentence with a tremendous amount of team effort behind it. But it is achievable, with the right plan, focus and discipline.

Let's start with key drivers of value and Forrester's recent case study on our joint efforts. Then, in a series to follow I will cover the "what" and "how" of getting started.

Shooting at Lighthouses - A Lesson for Marketers

Jun 28 2010

A colleague of mine has two chidren - ages 8 and 5 – with no plans to increase the size of her brood. So you can imagine her surprise when she received a box from a leading baby food manufacturer that contained five samples and a letter, which welcomed her to their loyalty program and indicated that she would be receiving additional samples and offers in the coming months. And, then they came – direct mail pieces with diaper samples, coupons and other goodies - at least eight in total.

Talk about an expensive “mistake” for the manufacturer. Who knows how my colleague ended up on this particular marketing list, which was obviously geared towards a particular demographic (i.e., women with babies), but I'm pretty sure she wasn’t the only one who ended up on the list erroneously.

Which leads me to the topic of this blog post – how do companies avoid these marketing blunders, which can be costly in terms of both reputation and hard dollars? The answer will be revealed in the video clip below.

What is Killing Newspapers? Online Media Business Model and Customer Intelligence

Jun 3 2010

By now we are all familiar with the online media business model. It’s all about hits – well sort of. First, we have to remember that media companies have two groups of customers:

Those who consume their content.
Those who purchase rights to advertise alongside their content.

When you purchase advertising in print newspapers, the rate card will often include demographics and circulation data. This provides the marketer with information about who their ads are targeting. This is far from perfect. The advertiser cannot select to target say, only affluent subscribers, or those looking to purchase a car.

Customer Intelligence Comes of Age: Reporting from the Forrester Marketing Forum

May 12 2010

Forrester’s Marketing Forum, as I wrote in the recent post, Forrester’s Marketing Forum – Are You Planning to Attend, was intended to deliver value to attendees through a variety of means – content, networking, council meetings and analyst 1-on-1s.

So did it deliver? Yes, it did. Quaero folks onsite spoke with peers, clients and analysts, all of whom agreed that the content will help to shape the decisions they make back at their companies.

Why was it so powerful? A lot of it had to do with the content and theme. Adaptive Marketing: How to Design a Flexible Marketing Organization to Thrive on Change felt particularly relevant as we start to see a light at the end of the recessionary tunnel.

Here are some of the things we learned:

Web Analytics is More Than Just a Reporting Tool

Mar 8 2010

Recently I was on a keynote panel at the National Center for Database Marketing (NCDM). In response to a question from the audience, one of my co-panelists pooh-poohed the value of web analytics. He referred to it as just a fancy reporting mechanism for web activity with little relevance for marketing. I was a little surprised by the comment and was itching to make a rebuttal, but the moderator chose to take the conversation in a different direction. "Web analytics" is one of those terms that tends to be thrown around casually by folks seeking to impress others and can mean different things to different people (and mean nothing to most people).

What's in a name?

Aug 5 2009

Customer Data Management. Customer Intelligence Management. Data Intelligence Management. The notion of using customer data to drive investment decisions has propagated many organizational names and acronyms over the last few years. Customer Intelligence Officers were crowned, integrated task forces were formed, and dedicated publications multiplied. Why? Because data = $.

Customer Intelligence - Still Waiting for the Revolution

Feb 3 2009

Think about the world before the industrial revolution. There were no factories, no organized labor and therefore no systematic ways of producing goods and services. Instead there were a myriad of individuals or small workshops working in isolation, sometimes producing masterpieces of craft and art that we admire to this day.

I think the analogy applies very directly to the state of customer intelligence today where, despite all of the advances in data, technology and the stated objective of most companies to embrace “analytics” or “customer intelligence”, this still remains an area which in my opinion is at best a cottage industry within most large organizations.