Bob Thompson

In March 2013, The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) conducted two concurrent surveys of consumers and executives, to explore the effectiveness of different marketing channels. Respondents were balanced between US and UK markets.

The study, sponsored by Lyris, came to two big conclusions:

• There are serious gaps in marketers’ perception of how consumers want to engage with brands, what influences their purchase decisions and how they view privacy
• Marketers face big challenges in harnessing Big Data, when harnessing complex data sets has become a critical factor for success.

Ok, let's break that down a bit.

Email is not dead. Neither are catalogues

For new product research, consumers narrowly prefer email (37%) over printed catalogues (35%) and personal referrals (33%). Social and web channels ranked much lower, somewhat at odds with marketer's budgets which favor...

In my first year in business as a fledgling CRM consultant in 1998, I attended a Goldmine conference and came away impressed with the product and company. At the time, Goldmine was one of the top contact manager solutions, although the company introduced versions that could support a sales team as well.

The design point was much like ACT! -- another popular contact management solution -- designed for the individual user first, and management second. Users loved it, but over the years the company was sold, the founders left, and the company got swallowed up in the CRM industry abyss.

To make a long story short, one of the co-founders Jon Ferrara "retired" from the industry for quite a few years, spent time with his family and watched the CRM/SFA industry continue to pump out solutions designed for sales managers. Meanwhile, the cloud computing and "social customer" movements sparked some ideas. In 2009, Jon got back into the game and introduced...

There's been much speculation for the past couple of years that Salesforce.com would buy Eloqua, Marketo, or some other marketing automation (MA) vendor to shore up a weak spot in its product line.

Well, Eloqua was bought by Oracle and Marketo just went public. Today Salesforce.com finally made its move, announcing that it will acquire marketing software firm ExactTarget in a deal valued at about $2.5 billion, more than a 50% premium. Rumor has it that Benioff had to compete hard to get the deal, and my bet is that SAP was the other contender.

$2.5 billion is a huge deal compared to Marketo's market value, so the only conclusion I can reach is that Benioff had something bigger in mind -- entering the B2C space! This is something Salesforce.com has tried in customer service and largely come up short. But customer service is not really the "DNA" of Salesforce....

Last week I enjoyed attending Medallia's Best Practices Forum, the annual customer conference for the provider of Customer Feedback Management Solutions.

Medallia is an interesting story, having climbed into a leadership position in the EFM industry in the past few years. Now the company is approaching 300 employees, has opened offices in London and Buenos Aries, and launched an Institute for CX certification. A recent $35 million investment from Sequoia Capital will be used to build out its platform and expand its market presence.

Medallia is probably best known for its work in the hospitality industry, but in recent years it has scored some big wins in retail, high tech...