Blog by S.Swaminathan

I was reflecting over the weekend about Forrester's Social Technographics Ladder of Participation. While it was focussed on emerging social technologies, I felt there were some trends, learnings and practices that can be applied from here to refresh marketing thinking, practices, evolving needs to e...

David Baker provides some interesting insights on customer lifecycle. I quite like the idea of identifying "switch points" when a customer is likely to switch to another product/brand or is ready to move to a product in the higher tier. The key question to me though is the ability of compa...

Frank Capek drew my attention to a recent report  on how customers & devoting signifcant executive time on managing customers will be central focus of CEOs during 2008 (Report)

From the executive summary:

”The first theme is that this may be a year in which there is renewed vigor around the c...

While there has been lot of discussions around the need for single view of customers across an enterprise over the last few years, 2008 seems to be a year when this trend could gain a lot of momentum.

Aberdeen Group surveyed over 250 companies to identify the strategies, capabilities and enablers th...

We are coming to the end of 2007 and dawn of another new year. It's time for predictions again, I presume! Chief Marketer has some predictions:

1. There will be an ongoing emphasis on “engagement” measures.This is getting harder and harder to measure using models that had already lost their efficacy in ...

If you are obsessed with customer-centricity in your organization, it make sense to have some icons that serves as a benchmark for the organization to emulate and live-up to. CRM Buyer has an interesting article on how Lands' End did it:

Motivation can take many forms. At Lands' End these days, it ha...

Capital One recently announced the launch of Card Lab.  Ron Shevlin writes about this:

Capital One launched Card Lab, which it claims is the first “do-it-yourself” credit card offer. It’s an interactive tool that lets prospective card applicants choose among a number of options to build their ow...

Carleen Hawn has drawn-up a nice summary of McKinsey's article.

Technology alone is rarely the key to unlocking economic value: companies create real wealth when they combine technology with new ways of doing business. … we have identified eight technology-enabled trends that will help shape busines...

Lauren Hoyt, Editor, SearchCRM provides some great perspective on the difference between CRM and CEM( Customer Experience Management):

First there's the question of a definition. I asked Lior Arussy, one of the thought leaders in this arena, to define customer experience management.

According to Lior,...

I have been posting a lot of thoughts on the future of marketing and how it's changing dramatically. Here's one more perspective from Idris Mootee. He has an interesting presentation on this topic which brings to life the challenges that lies ahead for CEOs, CMOs and their communication partners.Tak...