“You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” so corporate management always wants to measure analyst relations. It’s easy to count briefings and such, but that misses the point. One should audit results, not effort. The result you want, of course, is a shift in your favor (or favour, for the Brits reading this) in analyst…
What a difference a year makes. In 2008 Forrester was the winner of the Analyst Firm of the Year award. However, since then we’ve seen a different tone to the conversation about Forrester: while praise for Forrester’s analysts continues, vendors’ dissatisfaction with the firm seems to be rising, especially in Europe.
AR managers need to quit whining about Forrester’s role based research. To make progress, start speaking about the success imperatives its role-based research is founded on. It’s been more than two years since Forrester started the series of focus groups that identified the success imperatives. They gathered together people in each of the roles that…
In one scene of ‘What Women Want‘, a recovering chauvinist advises a colleague about her relationship: “I mean, you’re either interesting or you’re not. Ask him to decide.” The same dilemma, and same guidance, faces managers who invite analysts to briefing events and get invoices in return. AR professionals need to push back against firms…
The world economy is now in a downward spiral which was avoidable but now places significant challenges for industry analysts and the ecosystem that exists around them. With this post we’re start a new series, Save the analysts, to outline how analysts firms need to respond. The starting point is that consulting and analysts firms…
Gianni Catalfamo, co-leader of the European Technology Practice of the Brodeur|Pleon Worldwide, has posed some important questions in his recent Mzinga case study. As one of the few nuclear engineers working in PR, Gianni’s thoughts are always worth reading. He discusses the choice of Forrester’s web strategist Jeremiah Owyang to caution clients about Mzinga, a…
Stacey Hawkins, until recently Gartner’s worldwide Managing VP of Research Methodology, praised our recent podcast on the Magic Quadrant in a comment. She makes the important point that lack of clarity, either by the vendor or by the analyst, is behind most of the difficult issues associated with the MQ. I consider myself something of…
Merv Adrian, the former Forrester analyst who recently founded IT Market Strategy, has produced a useful summary of some of the discussion about analysts who blogs. It’s a useful summary of the discussion on blogs’ influence, because it shows both what’s on people’s mind and also the blind spots that are not coming up in…