CSG’s Quaero was a Silver Sponsor of the recent Forrester Marketing Forum in Orlando, Florida. If you attended the Forum, you’ll probably recognize these key themes:

Major Theme #1– Innovation Lives
Marketers should innovate now and leverage tools (like Forrester’s Accessible Innovation Risk Scorecard) to help them qualify and assess the risk of potential innovation. 

Major Theme #2 – Take Risks in a Down Economy
Case studies emphasized thinking things through, outlining expected outcomes – and potential pitfalls – and flawless execution. Key takeaway: make risk meaningful and manageable.

Major Theme #3 – Social Media is Everywhere
The media was the message! It was clear throughout the Forum that people were using social media – like blogs, Flickr and Twitter – to connect with other attendees during the event. 

Major Theme #4 – Marketers are Planning for Better Times
More and more people think that the national economy is on the path to recovery. Marketers need to prepare now by marketing differently.

Here are some highlights from a few of the Forum’s more interesting guest speakers:

Based on the Annual Customer Satisfaction Index, customers rate airlines the very worst in terms of customer satisfaction, below such crowd pleasers as health insurers, the U.S. Postal Service and even the Internal Revenue Service. But, JetBlue – which leverages Twitter to get the word across on promotions and flights – has won the JD Power Customer Satisfaction award for airlines for four years in a row and has delivered better financial performance than any other airline. Embracing customer-centric social media is paying off.

It was nice to hear a common sense, black-and-white approach when most marketers tend to complicate things. PetSmart talked about keeping segmentation simple – good (i.e. valuable customers) and bad (i.e. not valuable customers). The difference in value between top decile customers ($750 per year) and bottom decile ($3 per year) is eye-popping, but not uncommon. What is uncommon is the company’s decision to actually focus on the high value customers and do it effectively – multi-channel deployment with attention to old-fashioned operational details.

And, lastly, Canoe Ventures is doing innovative set top box based targeted advertising. If successful, it could break many paradigms and could be an earthquake in the worlds of TV advertising and related fields including media buying. It may help to stem the tide of dollars flowing from traditional media to online. On the other hand, the lines between traditional and online itself will be blurred in the future and Canoe will help accelerate that convergence.

As usual, the Forrester team presented a strong Marketing Forum. It’s a top pick for me to attend next year.

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