InsightIQ Blog

Forrester Marketing Forum 2009: A brief review

May 4 2009

I recently attended the Forrester Marketing Forum held at the Walt Disney Yacht and Beach Club Resort in Orlando, Florida. Click here to read the official Forrester blog post. I'd like to provide some highlights from a few of the more interesting speakers, with a focus on observations that were not obvious:

There was a great deal of emphasis on the use of social media and how it is changing the practice of marketing. JetBlue leverages Twitter to get the word across on promotions and flights. 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. Just goes to show that even in the vast wilderness that is airline marketing there are a few oases of innovative marketing thinking and execution. JetBlue 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.
PetSmart talked about keeping segmentation simple - good (i.e. valuable customers) and bad (i.e. not valuable customers). It was nice to hear that black and white view when most folks are trying to complicate things. The difference in value between top decile customers ($750 per year) and bottom decile ($ 3 per year) was eye popping, but not uncommon. What was uncommon is the decision to actually focus on the high value customers and do it effectively, with multi channel deployment with attention to old fashioned operational details. Nothing fancy, but the positive financial results in a tough economy shows that it is working.
Canoe Ventures is doing set top box based targeted advertising. If successful, it could break many paradigms and could be the 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.
David Reibstein, Marketing Professor at Wharton talked about the concept of Reverse Marketing, which I have written about. Over the long run this trend toward is going to fundamentally change the nature of marketing. Another interesting framework he presented was about marketing spending in a downturn. Instead of repeating the received, but often impractical, wisdom that marketing spending should be increased during a recession, he presented a model of how it should be tuned based on competitors' actions. A much more thoughtful and considered approach to the difficult problem of how much to spend on marketing in difficult times.

Overall, the Forrester folks staged a very good conference. No great new ideas, but some good reinforcement of some of the interested trends in this arena. It is a top pick for me to attend next year.

This article is filed under:

View more Blog Posts

View Entire Team Provided By

Naras Eechambadi, PhD
Senior Vice President and General Manager, Quaero

Naras Eechambadi joined CSG in December of 2008 as part of CSG's acquisition of Quaero, a leading marketing solutions provider with a simple but powerful focus: using customer insights and strategy to drive business…