A Forrester Consulting Thought Leadership Paper Commissioned By Neustar

Align Marketing And IT To Meet Today’s Business Goals November 2013

Forrester Consulting

Align Marketing And IT To Meet Today’s Business Goals

Table Of Contents Executive Summary ................................................................................................................................................................................. 2 Enterprises Embrace The Age Of Data And Customer Engagement ............................................................................................ 2 Marketing Must Power Growth With A Focus On Digital And Customer Engagement ......................................................... 4 IT Must Brace The Organization Against Data Risks And Tech Challenges ............................................................................... 5 Joint Marketing And IT Initiatives Fall Short, And Frustrations Mount ..................................................................................... 6 Marketing And IT Must Align To Succeed With Today’s Business Goals ................................................................................. 10 Key Recommendations ......................................................................................................................................................................... 13 Appendix A: Methodology................................................................................................................................................................... 14 Appendix B: Demographics ................................................................................................................................................................. 14 Appendix C: Endnotes .......................................................................................................................................................................... 15

© 2013, Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. Forrester®, Technographics®, Forrester Wave, RoleView, TechRadar, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies. For additional information, go to www.forrester.com. [1-LQN27T]

About Forrester Consulting Forrester Consulting provides independent and objective research-based consulting to help leaders succeed in their organizations. Ranging in scope from a short strategy session to custom projects, Forrester’s Consulting services connect you directly with research analysts who apply expert insight to your specific business challenges. For more information, visit www.forrester.com/consulting.

Page 1

Forrester Consulting

Align Marketing And IT To Meet Today’s Business Goals

Executive Summary In today’s age of increasingly connected consumers and customer engagement, market leaders are those who create exceptional digital experiences while protecting customer data. Great digital customer experiences and the data used to support and tailor these experiences are best realized when there is a successful marriage of IT and marketing leaders. Unfortunately for many companies today, IT and marketing are in need of couple’s therapy. To uncover more on this topic, Neustar commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a study about IT and marketing priorities and concerns and the different business unit group interactions that enable — or hinder — key business initiatives today. This study included a detailed online survey of 260 enterprise IT and marketing decisionmakers in the US, Canada, and the UK, along with six follow-up interviews with select IT and marketing survey-takers in May 2013.1 In addition to the survey, we drew from Forrester’s extensive marketing and security analyst research and insights gleaned from discussions with enterprises.

Key Findings Forrester found a mixed environment where roughly half of companies experienced challenges in expectation-setting and alignment between IT and marketing groups. Forrester’s study yielded two key findings: • The post-digital world mandates that IT and marketing reach a new understanding. Digital investments serve

as the foundation for strategic marketing initiatives that drive business growth. When combined with customer insights derived from analysis of all customer touchpoints, digital investments deliver the rich customer engagements today’s empowered customers demand. Alignment of marketing and IT are essential to achieve the full potential of digital investments. • Marketing and IT suffer from a problem of differing perspectives. Each department has different priorities —

and rightly so! But many companies fail to see a bigger enterprisewide picture, in which alignment between the two roles is crucial. This leads to siloed technology deployments and wasted spending and contributes to an inconsistent and suboptimal customer experience that reduces competitive advantage. In effective organizations, executive support is the primary driver to achieving role alignment and understanding.

Enterprises Embrace The Age Of Data And Customer Engagement In 2012, the number of people using the Internet on a regular basis exceeded 2.4 billion. With the number expected to grow to 3.5 billion by 2017, almost half of the overall world population will be connected online and via mobile devices!2 And, where consumers go, companies — and specifically, marketers — must follow, with the right digital strategy to engage these consumers in their preferred digital channel. Unfortunately, since customer engagement has become digital, cybercriminals are eager to crash the party and profit from stolen customer data. Today, 90% of companies surveyed agree that data security and privacy of customer data is a priority (see Figure 1). Several things are certain in today’s age: • Data is the fuel for the growth engine. Data increasingly fuels business and revenue growth as analytics and data

intelligence enhance decision-making and provide better ways to tailor customer experiences. Companies are combining the data they collect directly from customers with data from third-party sources like database providers and data marketplaces to form a more complete picture of customers.3 This data is valuable when used

Page 2

Forrester Consulting

Align Marketing And IT To Meet Today’s Business Goals

correctly, but it can erode customer trust when used too aggressively or compromised. Trust is a crucial element to turning data into profits. • Connectivity and customer engagement are critical. Today’s empowered customers are self-educating across

ever-increasing digital channels. Digital behaviors previously confined to a PC have proliferated across moreportable devices. This has ushered in an era of pervasive interactivity, characterized by the 42% of US online adults who Forrester labels as always addressable customers who access information across multiple devices, from multiple locations, many times per day.4 This connectivity has led 75% of enterprises surveyed for this study to say they invest in efforts to increase customer engagement via digital channels. • Digital separates market leaders from laggards. Companies that have learned to lead with digital have disrupted

market after market, gaining competitive advantage. Retail organizations that live and breathe digital customer engagement and seamlessly marry their online and offline initiative have achieved competitive differentiation in their markets. With comprehensive analytics to understand customer behavior and strong offline business models backed by a rich digital infrastructure, these organizations have successfully captured market leadership and have expanded their core business into new segments.

Figure 1 Organizational Priorities Reflect The Importance Of Data And Online Presence For Companies Today

Base: 260 US, UK, and Canadian enterprise IT and marketing decision-makers Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Neustar, May 2013

Page 3

Forrester Consulting

Align Marketing And IT To Meet Today’s Business Goals

Figure 2 Marketers’ Priorities Confirm The Importance Of Data And Digital Customer Engagement

Base: 129 US, UK, and Canadian enterprise marketing decision-makers (selected responses shown) Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Neustar, May 2013

Marketing Must Power Growth With A Focus On Digital And Customer Engagement Eighty-seven percent of marketers participating in the survey agree that a focus on two critical areas is required to drive business growth: 1) using data and analytics to improve business decisions and outcomes, and 2) enhancing customer experience across digital and physical touchpoints. Marketers understand that they must increase their ability to incorporate digital into their execution strategies. And, they recognize that they can’t do it alone. Nearly 60% of marketers identified creating deeper alignment with IT as a key priority (see Figure 2). Specifically, the marketing organization must: • Enhance digital marketing capabilities. With the explosion of new digital channels, digital marketing has taken

on a higher level of importance in marketers’ strategies and customer engagement plans. Marketers must be able to meet today’s empowered customer in the digital channel of their choice with a consistent experience across these channels. No easy task; marketers must seek the advice and guidance of their IT counterparts to ensure success. • Support analytics and customer understanding. In the age of the customer, marketers need to obsess about the

customers the business serves and only serve those they can obsess over.5 This means developing a rich understanding of their business needs, pain points, and behaviors and fostering a customer-first approach to sales and marketing. Marketers can transform the wealth of available unstructured data at the company’s fingertips into smart actionable insights about buyers’ behavior to enhance customer experiences across digital and physical

Page 4

Forrester Consulting

Align Marketing And IT To Meet Today’s Business Goals

touchpoints.6 Collecting, linking, and then transforming the customer-level data needed to deliver these insights requires a well-thought-out data structure supported by the right technology infrastructure. Successful marketers have discovered that collaboration with their IT colleagues produces the best results. • Demonstrate ROI. Tracking marketing performance merely by campaign responses, page hits, site visits, and

unique visitors is a distant memory. While these basic metrics are easy to track and report, they fail to show marketing’s contribution to the bottom line. As a result, marketers are now under more pressure than ever to prove return on investment (ROI). They won’t get the budget they need to accomplish their agenda unless they can prove that what they are doing works and has a positive impact on business results. Over 80% of marketers surveyed agree that demonstrating the ROI impact of marketing strategies with improved measurement methodologies is a key priority. The good news for marketers is that recent advancements in marketing analytics and data accessibility make ROI measurements more possible than ever before. But, demonstrating ROI requires a comprehensive approach to the measurement of marketing effectiveness and the analysis of financial outcomes. To succeed, marketers need IT’s support to put the right technology infrastructure in place that can integrate data results across channels.

IT Must Brace The Organization Against Data Risks And Tech Challenges Over three-fourths (77%) of IT decision-makers assert that creating deeper IT and business alignment with their peers in other parts of the organization is a priority. But the bulk of IT’s responsibilities remain focused on protection: data protection, budget performance, and disaster recovery in the face of unexpected disasters or external attacks (see Figure 3). Looking forward, the variety of IT priorities cuts across a swath of demands — relating to technical concerns, tactical business requirement, and strategic support for business goals. Specifically, the IT organization must meet demands for: • IT infrastructure. This is the very backbone of an organization’s IT operations and ability to maintain a reliable

online presence. IT must address the threat of DDoS and hacktivist attacks on systems, in addition to having contingency plans for when unexpected disruptions (such as a natural disaster) occur. An outage or disruption of access can have crippling effects and mean lost revenue for a business, especially one that relies on an online presence (such as a cloud services provider or company that engages in eCommerce). Online consumers’ patience will also only go so far, as many have come to expect to be able to engage with a company at any time via online channels, and a company’s reputation may also suffer. • Privacy. Privacy is an increasingly touchy and complex topic for companies today. There are a myriad of data

privacy regulations that sometimes conflict with other laws. For example, organizations are attempting to distinguish between retaining and protecting data to fully comply with certain laws and retaining as little data as possible to comply with other data protection laws.7 Consumers are also more aware of privacy concerns today and are expressing concern about their privacy in interactions with companies.8 The impact boils down to trust. Can consumers trust the company to handle their data and respect their privacy? Or should they take their business elsewhere? • Security. What does an organization need to protect? Its data, a company’s crown jewels: customer data,

proprietary corporate data, trade secrets, intellectual property, and other sensitive corporate information, including employee data. So long as an organization is connected to the Internet, it — and its data — will be susceptible to attack. While attacks like DDoS on IT infrastructure can cause problems with availability and impact an organization’s online presence and services, DDoS is also increasingly used as a distraction to hide an attacker’s attempt to steal data. Customer data (personally identifiable information like name, address, email,

Page 5

Forrester Consulting

Align Marketing And IT To Meet Today’s Business Goals

phone number, and birth date, and account credentials) makes for an attractive target for cybercriminals because they can easily monetize it via underground channels and make a quick profit. Consumers then pay the price, whether it’s identity theft, fraud, or the mere annoyance of having to change logins and passwords that they then must spend time and effort to resolve. Data security also ultimately relates to consumer trust in an increasingly digitized world. Can consumers trust that their online transactions — and thus their data — with this company are secure?

Figure 3 Top IT Priorities Revolve Around Protecting Data, Ensuring Availability Of Services, And Enabling The Business

Base: 131 US, UK, and Canadian enterprise IT decision-makers (selected responses shown) Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Neustar, May 2013

Joint Marketing And IT Initiatives Fall Short, And Frustrations Mount IT and marketing come to the table with very different organizational objectives. It is no surprise when comparing concerns across IT and marketing that IT is more concerned with data breach and leakage, while marketing is more concerned about customer experience (see Figure 4). Yet, these concerns are intertwined, and IT and marketing each have something at stake here. IT is concerned about controlling technology costs and reducing access risk. At the same time, marketing is chartered with growth and improving the overall customer experience, with technology playing a big role. The result? Marketers and IT professional feel like they are speaking two different languages.

Page 6

Forrester Consulting

Align Marketing And IT To Meet Today’s Business Goals

Figure 4 IT And Marketing Have Different, But Related, Concerns

Base: 131 enterprise IT decision-makers and 129 enterprise marketing decision-makers in the US, Canada, and the UK Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Neustar, May 2013

“IT does not understand our needs, and they don’t support us well.” (CMO, food and beverage company) Today, 43% of marketing decision-makers feel that IT and marketing have shared goals and objectives. At the same time, almost half (49%) feel that IT understands marketing’s vision and strategy for the technology infrastructure required to achieve marketing objectives, and a similar proportion (47%) feel that IT actually supports marketing goals well (see Figure 5). While some organizations are working toward the same goals, there is still a long way to go in many others. A CMO of a consumer packaged goods company shared their desire for IT to help marketing evaluate technology solutions and then recommend how to best implement the chosen solution in the complex enterprise technology architecture. While the desire is there to work with IT, the belief that IT has a poor understanding of marketing inhibits further progress. “Marketing does not tell us what they need, and they go around us to make IT purchases.” (IT Director, healthcare) From the perspective of IT, 55% of IT decision-makers tell us that marketing is providing detailed business requirements to IT for technology purchases (see Figure 6). While encouraging, more firms should be doing this. If business requirements are not laid out clearly from the start, IT cannot provide the necessary technology selection guidance or implementation and integration support needed for such an investment. IT does not operate in isolation,

Page 7

Forrester Consulting

Align Marketing And IT To Meet Today’s Business Goals

and IT groups must go to great lengths to ensure that everything in the IT environment meets business needs along with security and regulatory requirements. On the flip side, 43% of IT decision-makers say that marketing has purchased technology solutions in the past without consulting or involving IT.9 CMOs know they need technology and its benefits to accelerate business growth and enhance customer engagement. But rather than get caught in the IT priority list, many go rogue and buy technology to suit their immediate needs. In the end, by amassing a technology patchwork consisting of point technology solutions, marketers will fail to drive the digital marketing performance they expect.10 An IT director at a healthcare organization shared that at one point the marketing group in his company was going around IT and negotiating contracts on their own because they felt IT involvement would slow down the process. The siloed IT implementations resulted in inefficiencies. Conscious efforts were made to speed up IT involvement as the organization found that marketing did not always understand what they were actually purchasing, and more money was wasted by going around IT rather than working with IT.

Figure 5 Marketing Tends To Work Independently Of IT; Few Companies Have Shared Goals And Understanding

Base: 129 enterprise marketing decision-makers in the US, Canada, and the UK Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Neustar, May 2013

Page 8

Forrester Consulting

Align Marketing And IT To Meet Today’s Business Goals

Figure 6 IT Sees That Marketing Looks To IT As A Technology Partner, But IT Needs Help Understanding Their Requirements

Base: 96 enterprise IT decision-makers in the US, Canada, and the UK Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Neustar, May 2013

IT/Marketing Disconnects Revolve Around Misalignment And Misinterpretation In speaking to marketing and IT decision-makers about the challenges they face in working with each other, a few common challenges come to the surface: • Misaligned and unrealistic implementation timelines. Marketing and IT miscues begin with a differing

definition of time-to-market requirements. Marketers want to build a competitive advantage with rapid technology implementations, but IT’s disciplined processes often slow the implementation process beyond marketing’s tolerance level. And while Agile IT development is having a positive impact, overall expectations still differ. “Today, IT doesn’t seem to have hard deadlines while from a business standpoint, I do. I need IT to have hard deadlines and to meet those deadlines with my requirements met. How they do it, isn’t our call. They know how to do the technology part, they know how to run that business, and I know how to run my part of the business. But, we consistently miss meeting each other’s expectations.” (Marketing manager, healthcare) • Unclear budget ownership and expectations. Budget proposals and budget-setting processes will vary

depending on the organization, but it’s important for both marketing and IT to come to a common understanding of how joint initiatives should be funded, rather than assume that it will come out of one budget or the other. In some cases, it may make sense to pool budget. The more marketing and IT can articulate a joint business case and tie it into broader business goals, the better chance for funding.

Page 9

Forrester Consulting

Align Marketing And IT To Meet Today’s Business Goals

“During strategic planning each year, IT works with various departmental VPs (including marketing) to determine the IT required for their business unit proposals. Then, in IT’s budget proposal, those related IT requirements are included.” (VP of IT, academic research center) • Lack of communication and awareness of each other’s efforts. Like any relationship, communication is

important. When communication is lacking and each group is unaware of what the other is trying to do, it’s likely that the few times marketing and IT actually do communicate will occur in time of crisis or when it’s too late to make any meaningful impact. “I know we have a marketing group, but we really haven’t had to do that much with them. If marketing finds an application that they want to use, marketing will buy it, and then tell IT to install it. Sometimes we’ll have to tell them they don’t have the infrastructure to install it.” (IT manager, consulting services firm)

Marketing And IT Must Align To Succeed With Today’s Business Goals In companies where IT and marketing teams are well-aligned, initiatives and organizational goal-setting are typically top down processes. The organization is able to articulate clear business goals and work across business units to identify the necessary initiatives to support those goals. In such cases, aligning IT and marketing goals to common, core goals reduces isolated projects and wasteful spending. This marriage of IT and marketing is highly dependent on not just alignment of goals, but expectations.

What IT Wants: “Marketing, Help Us Help You” Across key business and IT initiatives, IT is generally not looking for marketing to be involved in marketing technology evaluation teams, and a few expect marketing to own the whole budget for marketing technology purchases (see Figure 7). IT’s biggest expectations of marketing include: • Define clear business priorities and requirements. IT is not a mind reader. Marketers can help their partners in

IT by defining and clearly articulating what it is they are trying to do. With a clear understanding of objectives and requirements, IT can then help provide better and more-targeted technology guidance and information about any possible limitations or potential concerns within the current IT and relevant regulatory environment. • Participate on the project implementation team. Marketers can help provide input at every stage of technology

implementation, ranging from helping to test-drive products for usability in the early evaluation stages to reporting any bumps that arise after implementation. Marketing should know that their enthusiasm can be contagious as well. A director of IT for a medical center spoke of how he was genuinely excited (and proud) that IT and marketing partnered together to roll out several new initiatives related to improving patient care and the patient experience at the medical center. • Define metrics and measures of success. A clear definition of what success will look like is important for any

initiative to help track progress over time and identify if changes are needed in order to get back on track to meet predefined goals. For marketing initiatives, IT relies on marketing to define these metrics and measures of success. Understanding these measures of success will help provide additional criteria for IT to bring to the table when evaluating technologies for implementation. There is a recognition that things may need to change over time, and IT won’t know how to best help implement changes if there is no clear understanding of metrics of success.

Page 10

Forrester Consulting

Align Marketing And IT To Meet Today’s Business Goals

Figure 7 What IT Expects From Marketing, What Marketing Expects From IT

Base: 96 enterprise IT and 119 enterprise marketing decision-makers in the US, Canada, and the UK Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Neustar, May 2013

What Marketing Wants: “IT, Be Our Tech Expert” In today’s post-digital world, technology is essential to manage the plethora of customer touchpoints and channels across the buying journey, develop data-based insights into customer behavior, manage messages effectively, and, most importantly, measure the ROI of all marketing investments. While marketing teams must understand and use the right technology the right way for the right results, they need the support and assistance of their IT colleagues. Marketing expects IT to be their tech expert, outline the possibilities and limitations, and facilitate the decision-making process. Their biggest expectations of IT include: • Provide support to marketing’s technology vision and strategy. Marketers expect IT to provide the expertise

they lack to evaluate and select the best technology option to realize their strategy. Marketing is not looking to bypass IT, nor are they saying they don’t need IT support. While marketers know what they want to accomplish, they need the help of IT to determine how best to accomplish their goals. • Lead technical aspects of marketing technology implementations. Marketers are chartered with doing

marketing, not leading technology implementation. Across categories, marketers prefer to leave technical implementation in the hands of IT. “I don’t think our marketers should be implementing technology. Marketing can help by sitting through vendor presentations and validating tools’ ability to meet our business objectives, but we want to leave the details of the implementation to IT.” (CMO, food and beverage) • Ensure that new technical solutions work well with existing enterprise technology. Most enterprise technology

infrastructures are complex and integrate technology solutions from initial order to cash and from sales support to customer service. Marketing solutions must fit and work well with the existing solutions to reap the full benefits of the investment. “We’re not as tech savvy, and won’t know how this solution connects to our ERP. We need IT to help us evaluate potential solutions and think about the implementation in our specific technology environment.” (CMO, food and beverage)

Page 11

Forrester Consulting

Align Marketing And IT To Meet Today’s Business Goals

What’s The Solution? If your marketing and IT teams don’t work together on a regular basis or only come together in a crisis, your organization is still in the early stages of achieving the organizational alignment required to prosper in today’s age of data and customer engagement. It’s time to marry strategies much more seamlessly, by putting a plan in place to align the priorities of both teams. The first step to resolution starts with a conversation to get at the root cause: Why are marketing and IT priorities not aligned? How are these priorities determined? What are IT’s main priorities? What are marketing’s main priorities? Where do — and can — they realistically meet up to support each other? Break down the silos and transform marketing and IT’s relationship into one where each is proactive and engaging the other from strategy planning to project implementation and results measurement (a project-based relationship) rather than coming together only when things go wrong (a panic-based relationship). With a project-based relationship in place, marketing and IT have taken the first step down the path to achieve a fully intertwined organization model focused on exceptional customer engagement maturity, and business results (see Figure 8).

Figure 8 Visualized Path To Marketing And IT Alignment

Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Neustar, May 2013

Page 12

Forrester Consulting

Align Marketing And IT To Meet Today’s Business Goals

KEY RECOMMENDATIONS To marry objectives, align the organization, and deliver securely on amazing customers experiences, especially in digital, marketing and IT must: •

Put customer understanding and their experiences first. Leading organizations understand how to create value through every customer interaction. Whether through delivering exceptional digital experiences or protecting customer data, marketing and IT can find common ground with a focus on customers. Marketers have a clear view of what they want to do to create unique customer experience; but they need IT’s help to define how to make it a reality. IT knows what they need to do to protect data and prevent breaches, but they need marketing to be sure that how they do it doesn’t impact the customer’s experiences. By working together, IT and marketing can strengthen their relationship and improve the overall business.

•

Add resources with new skills on each team. IT must include people with marketing experiences on their team. When IT resources understand marketing, they bring new ways of working to the IT team and new ways of communicating to the marketing team. On the other hand, marketing must include people that have technology competency in their organization. When marketing resources have technology competency, they understand when to involve IT in digital marketing solutions that will deliver the right customer experiences while integrating into the existing corporate technology infrastructure with security considerations in mind.

•

Establish shared goals and rewards. Make sure that the marketing and IT teams are invested in each other’s success. Cultivate an executive sponsor to help articulate common business goals from the top down. Then, set up shared success metrics and KPIs — such as pipeline and new customer growth, length of customer engagement on digital channels, time to convert from prospect to closed sale, overall system uptime and crisis management — for both marketing and technology projects to ensure that both teams are working toward the same goals. These shared success metrics and KPIs should be established at the beginning of the year as a part of the business strategy planning process. Be sure that the combined team shares responsibility for the success or failure of initiatives by having clear objectives for the team incorporated into each initiative. A solid foundation and expectation of teamwork will go a long way to improving marketing and IT alignment.

In today’s digital world, a company’s strong digital presence depends on marketing and IT working together to transform marketing’s vision into operation reality tightly integrated across an organization’s infrastructure. Strong alignment between these two groups will provide your organization an edge when it comes to getting the most out of your technology investment dollars to ensure you achieve overarching business goals. Bring marketing and IT together to better deliver the types of consistent digital experiences and engagement that customers have come to expect — and demand — today. It’s time to assess where your organization stands and identify the necessary transformation required to propel your business to the next level of customer engagement.

Page 13

Forrester Consulting

Align Marketing And IT To Meet Today’s Business Goals

Appendix A: Methodology In this study, Forrester conducted an online survey of 260 enterprise IT and marketing decision-makers in the US, Canada, and the UK, along with six follow-up interviews with selected IT and marketing survey-takers in May 2013. Survey and interview questions evaluated key marketing and IT initiatives and how the two groups coordinated technology implementation efforts. Survey participants included decision-makers in the marketing and IT departments. Respondents were offered an incentive as a thank you for time spent on the survey. The study began in May 2013 and was completed in the same month. The interviews took place between May 2013 and June 2013.

Appendix B: Demographics Figure 9 Geography And Company Size

Base: 260 enterprise IT and marketing decision-makers in the US, Canada, and the UK Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Neustar, May 2013

Figure 10 Seniority And Department

Base: 260 enterprise IT and marketing decision-makers in the US, Canada, and the UK Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Neustar, May 2013

Page 14

Forrester Consulting

Align Marketing And IT To Meet Today’s Business Goals

Figure 11 Industry Distribution

Base: 260 enterprise IT and marketing decision-makers in the US, Canada, and the UK Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Neustar, May 2013

Appendix C: Endnotes

1

To learn more about Forrester’s research on marketing technology purchases, see “The CMO’s Role In Technology Purchasing,” Forrester Research, Inc., June 20, 2013. 2

Source: Jitender Miglani, “The World Online Population Is Expected To Reach 3.5 Billion By 2017,” Jitender Miglani’s Blog, September 4, 2012 (http://blogs.forrester.com/jitender_miglani/12-09-04the_world_online_population_is_expected_to_reach_35_billion_by_2017). 3

Enterprises seeking to better understand their customers, market, and competitive landscape can’t afford to limit their insights to only what they already know — the data they generate themselves. Nor can they hope to gain better insight simply by purchasing demographic data or target audiences from third parties. To understand the ever-changing behaviors of perpetually connected customers, firms need to become collaborative, sharing their data and insight as much as they consume those of others. This approach lets firms adapt to a fast-changing market at market speed and tap what Forrester calls adaptive intelligence. As organizations gain adaptive intelligence, not only will they outsmart their competitors, they’ll also begin to productize and gain direct financial benefit from the specialized data they

Page 15

Forrester Consulting

Align Marketing And IT To Meet Today’s Business Goals

generate. To achieve these goals, marketing leaders must work together with business technology leaders to optimize their organization’s data capture, storage, analysis, and sharing capabilities and make that data available to the global data economy. Source: “Introducing Adaptive Intelligence,” Forrester Research, Inc., May 8, 2013. 4

The always addressable customer already makes up more than one-third of US online adults, individuals who “own and personally use at least three connected devices, access the Internet multiple times per day, and go online from multiple physical locations, at least one of which is on the go.” Source: “The Always Addressable Customer,” Forrester Research, Inc., September 26, 2012.

5

Empowered customers are disrupting every industry; competitive barriers like manufacturing strength, distribution power, and information mastery can’t save you. In this age of the customer, the only sustainable competitive advantage is knowledge of and engagement with customers. The successful companies will be customer-obsessed, like Best Buy, IBM, and Amazon.com. Executives in customer-obsessed companies must pull budget dollars from areas that traditionally created dominance — brand advertising, distribution lockup, mergers for scale, and supplier relationships — and invest in four priority areas: 1) real-time customer intelligence; 2) customer experience and customer service; 3) sales channels that deliver customer intelligence; and 4) useful content and interactive marketing. Those who master the customer data flow and improve frontline customer staff will have the edge. Source: “Competitive Strategy In The Age Of The Customer,” Forrester Research, Inc., October 10, 2013. 6

Source: “Rethink Marketing In The Buyer’s Context,” Forrester Research, Inc., February 21, 2013.

7

The most common complaint about privacy that Forrester hears from our clients is that the plethora of privacy laws in various jurisdictions and industry bodies are difficult to understand and sometimes in conflict with each other. The lack of harmonization within and across countries remains a source of confusion and annoyance for most security professionals. Source: “Identify And Influence Data Security And Privacy Stakeholders,” Forrester Research, Inc., September 12, 2012.

8

Security and privacy considerations extend from the front end of the house where marketing and sales reside all the way to the inner core where IT resides. In the US, 49% of consumers worry about their security and privacy when purchasing products online. The same can be said of Europe, where 44% of consumers are concerned about their security and privacy when sharing information to access a website. And with 25% of US consumers and 20% of European consumers expressing security and privacy concerns about their mobile apps, application security and app privacy policies must be taken seriously. Source: “Know Your Data To Create Actionable Policy,” Forrester Research, Inc., January 15, 2013. 9

Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Neustar, May 2013.

10

Source: “The CMO’s Role In Technology Purchasing,” Forrester Research, Inc., June 20, 2013.

Page 16