Sales in the field, at the branch, or at the retail level which have little or no access to marketing programs and little expertise in marketing implementation or database management. Many business-to-business and technology companies struggle to effectively support the complexities of their marketing functions. These challenges include, but are not limited to: Control of brand consistency as well as the marketing programs, when there is a constant pull to decentralize the marketing function to support resellers, VARS and OEM partners. Read More MORE >>

recently decided to go old school and took a drive to a brick-and-mortar Apple Retail Store to purchase an iPad. Kevin Gilbert. Unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock, you are aware that Apple has flooded the market with impressive state-of-the-art and stylish consumer electronics:  iPhone cell phones, iPod MP3 players, iPod Touch hand-held computers, and now the iPad tablet computer. Apple sold 3 million iPads in the first 80 days after launch. On the front-end of the product cycle (from a marketing point-of-view) Apple is stellar at driving demand. was excited to setup my new iPad. MORE >>

You will want to start by identifying all the stakeholders in your technology solution including people that will use the solution (your marketing team), those who will benefit from it (sales, retail, marketing partners or agencies), and those who will support it (your internal IT group, external services providers). Many of our clients ask us to assess their needs and readiness for new marketing technology.  Three Reasons to Build. We find there are three main reasons marketers invest in new technology, and your reasons should be at the core of your requirements document. MORE >>

Your customer sees you not for the departments that exist (Marketing, Sales, IT, Digital, Retail, etc.), With the influx of blogs and consumer social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, companies have a growing wealth of valuable information about how consumers are thinking about their products and services.  More and more often, these sites provide in-your-face descriptions of consumer perceptions of your brand. Opportunities and risks are hidden in the data thrown off by social sites and both can affect your bottom line! Too few! Web Analytics Forecasted to Grow at Rapid Pace. MORE >>

In the same report, Forrester says something so dead-on-the-money obvious that it’s easy to skim past it without recognizing what it means in what can be a short-sighted digital world:  “Although the Web may capture just 6% of an online shopper’s annual retail spending, consumers use it routinely to plan purchases made through offline channels.”. Andrew Lucyszyn. Do you remember measuring web site hits? For me, it’s a fuzzy memory, like watching a VHS tape of “Night Court&# , but I know I had a row of cells for it in my Microsoft Works spreadsheet. Who cares!? In that order. MORE >>