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Marketing and business communications company R.R. Donnelley & Sons has released a study which reveals that traditional marketing channels, including word of mouth, direct mail, and in-store signage, are largely untapped and underestimated by marketers. The research uncovers significant differen...

Writing about technology over the years I've produced many guides on how to do cool stuff with your computer. However, without the right foundation, even the most thorough guide can leave room for pesky variables to creep in. This made me realize how important it is to establish what firm footing fo...

Heyday does more than acquire brands. Its partnership model enables entrepreneurs to grow their businesses inside of Heyday and share in its equity. This approach gives sellers an edge by architecting supply chains to be agile and work with Fulfillment by Amazon, as well as investing in data capabil...

Holiday shoppers can expect to see a lot of out-of-stock warnings online this year, but that won't discourage them for opening their wallets to buy gifts for loved ones. According to retail sales watchers, consumers have launched their holiday shopping earlier than ever, spending US$72.4 billion onl...

Sales managers and their managers have had to make peace with the reality that they might not be able to get reps to use technology. But methodology alone or with technology is a more-or-less lost cause. Fortunately, the technology has improved consistently over the last two decades. Even more fortu...

What draws the consumer to a D2C brand over traditional businesses? Two words: customer closeness. That is, the ability for organizations to feel directly connected to the users of their products or services -- understanding their motivations, lifestyles, opinions, and attitudes. Let's first explore...

For those born after the mini-computer era (co-terminus with the original Star Trek), dilithium is the fuel used to power a warp core propulsion system needed for interstellar travel. Dilithium is both naturally occurring and rare, and when it melts, from overuse of the warp core, the starship is ba...

A new Forrester survey commissioned by Capgemini, Salesforce, and MuleSoft reveals companies face the same recurring customer experience (CX) struggles. They lack an integrated single source of truth for customer data and are strapped with subpar personalization capabilities.

A proposed law barring high-tech companies from favoring their own products over those of their competitors -- a practice called self-preferencing -- would harm consumers, competition and innovation, according to a report released Monday by The Schumpeter Project on Competition Policy at the Informa...

For years, affiliate marketers, social media companies, online marketplace platforms, and search engines alike have enjoyed the seemingly ubiquitous tax-free landscape from their digital activities afforded to them by the United States' Internet Tax Freedom Act of 1998. However, that could all be ch...

Surround strategy is the antithesis of rip and replace. Rather than replacement, a business can move parts of its workload from some workhorse system, say ERP, to Zoho -- where things like pre-built reports and Zia, an AI-based digital assistant, can help business users interrogate data stored on th...

This is not good. A new report commissioned by Replicant tells a story of customers frustrated when service fails or is way too slow. That's not new -- and Replicant is not the only vendor to ring the alarm. For many years Oracle has reminded vendors that one bad service encounter is enough to make ...

When a complex need arises, customers expect to be connected to a well-prepared agent who can quickly resolve the situation. That fix must be applied in a way that leaves both the customer and agent feeling great about the outcome. Fortunately, the technologies now exist that allow contact centers t...

There are three levels of abstraction that we can study to derive benefit, and this is abundantly clear in CRM. First there's the object, a material product or service that is the thing we trade money for. Then there's the experience, see where I'm going? Lastly there's the concept.