Finally, there's a video excerpt of my keynote speech for Forrester's Marketing Forum in Los Angeles (April 8-9, 2008). The theme of the entire conference was based on my report, Marketing's New Key Metric: Engagement. I was the opening keynote on the first day of the conference. The title of my speech was Engagement: A New Approach To Understanding Your Customers. It was pretty exciting once I got on stage, but it certainly was stressful...

I'm in the process of interviewing people for my upcoming Forrester report on corporate social responsibility. One of my interview participants pointed me to this great video by Annie Leonard called The Story Of Stuff. This 20 minute video illustrates the life cycle of the things we use every day. Annie, with a great illustrated animation hovering behind her, explains the stages of this process as extraction (obtaining the natural resources), production (using energy to...

Many companies are delusional about their customer centricity. Many claim to be just that, but only a handful actually are. It takes a big shift in philosophy to be human-centric, and most firms have a hard time overcoming that. Here are just a few of the key characteristics it takes for a firm to be human-centric: Human-centricity starts at the top. If these initiatives are buried deep within the organization, they have little chance of...

On Thursday I attended the MIT Enterprise Forum's Power, Drugs & Money Innovation Summit over at the Seaport World Trade Center. The event targeted New England entrepreneurs and focused on energy, medicine, and finance. The mid-morning panel session on the future of New England was pretty good. It consisted of a good mix of panelists including Doug Banks (Editor, Mass High Tech), Robert Buderi (Founder, CEO, Editor in Chief, Xconomy), Scott Kirsner (Innovation Economy columnist,...

This weekend I'm bound for Finland to meet with the folks at Nokia. I've decided to arrive a day earlier to spend some time in Helsinki. I've never been to Finland so I'm really looking forward to it, even though it will be pitch black most of the time and probably pretty cold (although it doesn't look much worse than Boston). I'm sure I'll need to stop at a Marimekko store at some point for...

I'm plugging in to day 3 of CES. The first day was a bit overwhelming. This show is so massive and it can be a bit confusing wandering around trying to figure out where things are. Additionally, wayfinding is a BIG problem here. I'm surprised after all these years that conference organizers haven't found a better way to help people navigate the spaces and events. I had to rip an ADA map out of a...

I just landed in Las Vegas for the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Pete and I are hitting the floor to see the latest and (possibly) greatest technology from all of your favorite engineers. I’ll be curious to see if there’s anything actually useful there, or if it’s just a bunch of technological bullshit. My big question that I’ll ask all of the vendors is “why this.” I’m seeking any insight into how they ended...

I recently published a Forrester report titled Marketing's New Key Metric: Engagement (more detail here on the Forrester Marketing blog). One interesting aspect of this research was presenting the idea that the marketing funnel is more complex than we may think. I initially presented to my fellow marketing analysts an idea that suggest the funnel was dead. That didn't go over so well, which demonstrates how sacrosanct the funnel is to marketers. However, they also...

So, I caught wind of the interesting article Activity is the goods for true satisfaction from Rob, who cited our buddy Neema as the person bringing this article into our collective mental space. It's basically about reasearch conducted by psychologists (and the article opens with a great dig on economists) that shows that people actually garner more satisfaction from buying services than material artifacts. Experiences make us happier than stuff....

Ian and I are working on our thesis project together as a team. We're focusing on the process of academic inquiry as it relates to Ph.D. students in the Arts & Humanities. It's a tough problem to solve, but our solution should be interesting. As we were brainstorming this weekend, we made some interesting connections. We already had realized that our thesis essays were related, but we hadn't really analyzed how. Not only did we...

After reading a little Malinowski for my Theory and Practice in Anthropoly class, I stumbled across a paragraph that stopped me dead in my tracks. Specifically it related to my thesis essay. In general, Malinowski briefly discusses (The Group and the Individual in Functional Analysis from Argonauts of the Western Pacific) the early discovery of an environmental factor (fire, use of a stick or stone) and how it becomes part of a culture, integrated into...