experience matters

Our team just flew back from Forrester’s Consumer Forum (and boy our arms are tired). This year’s Forum was held at the stunning Gaylord Texan which we jokingly referred to as the Bio-Dome due to it’s impressive indoor (yet outdoor feeling) western theme. Speaking of themes, this year’s theme was keeping ahead of tomorrow’s customer. Here’s a few highlights:

The Convenience Quotient
James McQuivey, Ph.D talked about the notion of a people sharing universal needs and specifically called out convenience not as a need but as an enabler, but what I liked best about his talk was one specific statement where he talked about the 5 great brands (Apple, Nike, etc) and their exclusivity. Essentially he said, “that’s great for them, the rest of us need to make things more convenient”. A sobering thought as many companies seek to emulate these types of brands not recognizing that their own DNA and business models are totally different. And common sense attributes like making something convenient often becomes compromised. We were able to live stream and record the introduction and James’ talk, you can view it here.

Beyond Data
Paco Underhill, author of “Why We Buy” and accomplished speaker gave a great and engaging performance including a slew of insightful (and entertaining) ethnographic videos of people in all sorts of shopping situations (not focus groups, but in real situations). But while Paco admitted that he’s helped gather thousands of hours of this type of observational activity, he made a simple but bold statement.

“The challenge of our culture isn’t collecting data, it’s figuring out what do do with it”

Amen Paco. Consider that this was said at a conference hosted and attended by many people who place a premium on gathering quality data.

Birds of A Feather
The trend of the Twitter back-channel continued to claim the spotlight and this conference was no exception. In addition to a handful of attendees elevating the conference to the 4th most popular topic of the day on Twitter, the people who use the social network got together offsite, and onsite. Heck, our very own booth became the local hangout for popular social media mavens such as Forrester’s own Jeremiah Owyang, Amy Worley of H&R Block, and Frank Eliason, the brains behind the much talked about and useful Comcast Cares initiative. Jeremiah and I also videotaped a short discussion on the “How” of social media. View it here.

Viva La Evolution!
This year our talk was called Viva La Evolution and we discussed the need for a change in organizations in response to the change in customer’s behavior that everyone agreed to (view video). If consumer behavior is evolving from the passive to the active—then businesses and brands would need to undergo their own evolution to stay ahead. In last year’s keynote, Charlene Li described the “revolt” of the consumer, our message was that companies may have to experience their own cultural revolutions in order to turn social media initiatives into something more meaningful. You can also view a video interview with myself and our guest speaker Deborah Schultz who is doing some interesting work with P&G, one of our clients. In the video, we discuss the value of experimentation in a financial downturn. As an interesting aside, our “Always In Beta” site was recorded and written up as something which educators should take a look it. You can view that video here.

So in a nutshell, that’s a few highlights from the event. If you came to our session, let us know what you thought about it in the comments area and see you next year! PS. For a master resource of coverage of the event, go here.

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