The growth of free and freemium analyst research is a fascinating development. In a way, it’s an acceleration of what we’ve seen in the analyst industry, previously, in the form of White Papers. Often White Papers were working well for both analysts and vendors. Increasingly it’s fascinating to see this kind of snowballing development, particularly…
If the business model was broken then top analyst firms like Gartner and Forrester would underperform their competitors: that’s the key point underpinning our recent defence of analysts. In fact, the top firms are increasing their lead. Their approach is producing unhappy customers (See the comment here) but any resulting loss in customers is much…
Industry analysts don’t need to have more industry experience than their clients – any more than accountants, management consultants or any other professionals – in order to add value. James Gardner and David Rossiter, who recently criticised analyst firms along these lines, ignore the glaring reality that analysts firms have continued to perform well. That…
Where do analyst firms get their money from? As this chart shows, there’s a big difference between different firms, and many people assume that has an impact on independence. On average, analyst firms get 37% of their revenue from vendors. However, the data are not normally distributed.
I’ve been chatting over an interesting question with Aaron Koh, Social Media Consultant with Brandtology (and an alumnus of EastWest PR): do Analysts consider the social media space as another dimension for their research? For example, mentioned Aaron, “when I dealt with IDC for Enterprise IT clients, they spoke to vendors about the future of…
A new benchmarking study of business-to-business vendors in North America shows very different responses to the recession. 44% of firms will cut marketing while 31% will increase by more. Former Gartner country manager Ally Motz writes that “the average spend changes for the entire group was actually slightly positive, increasing by 0.4% – especially on…
The first issue of PAC in Focus seems to have gone down well, since the newsletter from PAC is now on a quartely schedule. I always feel that AR managers should pay special attention to the newslatters from analyst firms when looking for models for the newsletters they want to send to analysts.
Tekrati founder Barbara French and Forrester’s Kevin Lucas have different views on the alignment of AR to sales. Forrester argues that even though many AR professionals say that their focus is facilitating sales, instead their goal should be whatever the business finds to be of value: that could be sales, or not.