The Forrester event has just kicked off here in Grapevine, Texas. Amazingly a very large crowd considering the present state of the economy. Carrie Johnson presenting the opening remarks. The theme of this years event is “Keeping Ahead of Tomorrow’s Customer”. The general conversation is around the continue paradigm shift of consumers from passive to active and enabled. Some of the key notes are from Blockbuster, American Airlines, NBC, and Citi Brands. Aside from NBC I am not sure how Blockbuster or American Airlines have transformed their consumer marketing and customer experience practices in light of Netflix and the state of overall travel industry. Should be interesting.
James McQuivey, Research Director from Forrester, is up now discussing how historical events like the adoption of electricity are predictors to future consumer adoption. The main take away is that barriers to previous technical innovations all follow similar adoption curves across telephone, television, PC, internet, and mobile. So what is the next thing to follow this trajectory? If they overlay their consumer research data they find four key themes that consumers have Connection, Uniqueness, Comfort, and Variety. Each consumer has these needs in different weightings and marketers need to understand how to speak and interact to the varying states of the consumer. Convenience is key, remove barriers to entry, know your target customers profile, and provide variety. James puts forward a new metric “CQ” - the “Convenience Quotient”. It’s benefits minus barriers to entry. Interesting way to look at your product or service as compared to competitors or alternatives. I think as we think about social technologies and the digital age the barriers to consumer participation have been so lower and are transforming the experience that consumers are having with products, services, and companies. All marketers need to re-evaluate the ways in which they market to the variety of consumer/human needs. He has a new paper about this coming soon.
