Forrester has released its latest Marketing Resource Management (MRM) Wave, highlighting nine vendors across its leadership, strong performer, contender and challenger ranks.

Marketing leaders need to bring an ecosystem-oriented mindset and take an active role in orchestrating their company’s marketing technology stack if they want to achieve competitive advantage.

Strategy, operations and commitment are critical if brands wish to ensure their ethical marketing approach can cut the mustard with consumers, Forrester principal analyst, Xiaofeng Wang, says.

Customer experience transformation is not just about the customer, it’s about how your employees come together cross-functionality and with agility to solve customer problems, says NRMA’s Tina Morell.

It’s time for customer experience leaders to open the aperture and think more broadly about the ways they can impact, align with and accelerate key business initiatives, says Forrester’s CX executive partner and senior analyst, Su Doyle.

As CX professionals know all too well, it takes years to gain maturity and consistency of customer experience across an organisation. But as Australia emerges from the shadows of the pandemic, it’s clear investments into CX transformation are paying dividends.

Ninety-nine in 100 marketers are impacted by data deprecation thanks to the demise of cookies and browser tracking restrictions and are looking to better harness zero-party data sets as a result. Yet less than half know how to use such data effectively, a new report has found.

A new Forrester report is predicting global marketing investment will grow by 30 per cent by 2025 to reach US$4.7 trillion, boosted by a mix of geographies and industries. But the hefty double-digit forecasts internationally are not expected in Australia.

As we usher in 2022, CMO asked the industry to share their top predictions around customer experience capability and culture, from the tech innovations driving its advancement, through to communication trends, measurement and the very human elements required in every CX approach.

The success of Facebook’s parent company rebrand to Meta and bet on the metaverse all still rely on the trust consumers feel for its core social media business, a leading Forrester analyst says.

CMOs and chief technology officers must focus on hybrid customer experiences - physical and digital – to deliver growth, according to the latest report from Forrester Research. And the way to achieve this is to align their teams and collaborate on a united marketing and tech strategy.

It is many a marketer’s dream to free up their people from boring, repetitive and low skill tasks. Because despite vendors’ promises of seamless integrations and data flows, manual data handling is an inescapable outcome when implementing new digital tools and processes. It was the pain felt by professionals in other functions however that first led to the emergence of a set of tools referred to as robotic process automation, or RPA.

Chief executives of emerging companies are looking for marketing and sales leaders to not only work together seamlessly to drive growth and revenue, but also base efforts on a shared view of the entire buyer journey.

A lack of data maturity and actionability is hampering utilisation of customer data platforms (CDPs), a new joint study by Epsilon, Adobe and Publicis Groupe and conducted by Forrester Consulting has found.

There’s a disconnect between the priorities of CX teams and C-Suites, said Forrester senior analyst and CX executive partner, Su Doyle, speaking at this week’s CX APAC 2021 event. “I believe it's high time we brought the two disciplines of CX and growth strategies together,” Doyle said.

The latest Forrester Wave has evaluated customer feedback management platforms and services and nominated the 12 most significant ones - Alida, Cisco Webex XM, Clarabridge, Concentrix, Confirmit, InMoment, Medallia, NICE, Qualtrics, Reputation, SMG and Verint. This report shows how each provider measures up and helps customer experience (CX) and insights professionals select the right one to match their needs.

Brands and marketers now have to find ways to engage in social justice discussions, from Black Lives Matter and racial unrest to consumer demands for sustainability, whether they want to or no, says Forrester's chief marketing officer.

CMOs will need to drive customer obsession within their firms, rather than simply guiding ad procurement and promotions, according to Forrester’s 2021 prediction. This means marketing teams will need to put the customer at the center of everything they do, including leadership, strategy and operations.

Planning, embracing change and transforming familiar approaches will be critical to success for B2B leaders, according to Forrester's SiriusDecisions research team​. And leaders across the revenue engine will need to accelerate the shift toward digitisation, buyer-centricity and customer obsession.

Leading brands like Alibaba will come to differentiate with ethical marketing to build long-term value off the back of the COVID-19 crisis, according to Forrester.

Five trends will permanently change business and tech as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new report from Forrester. The New, Unstable Normal describes how, despite healthcare and management procedures, COVID-19 will profoundly impact the next decade.