Forrester’s own David Cooperstein wrote a tour de force in competitive strategy in the age of the consumer. If you have a subscription, it’s well worth a read. The high level summary is that the economy has evolved from competing on factory size, to competing on distribution, to competing on information, to now, competing on consumer. The way that competitive successes will be generated in the future, during this age of the consumer, is by competing on the consumer. You don’t have to buy the thesis to think about it. Here are a few points to consider: Sometimes it really is the thought that counts Identical items, packaged and marketed differently, cause difference in preference, loyalty, and retention in the[…]

A charrette is an intense, collaborative session, that enables designers to draft a solution to a very complex problem. It’s a technique first used by artists. Then designers picked it up. And then later still, urban planners. And then a few brave souls wisely invited stakeholders in on the process. Finally, this approach would evolve into software development and web development. It is very applicable to solving analytical problems. First, consider the natural law below.                       In analytics, the proportion of what we don’t know always grows as more knowledge is added. The more imaginative the analyst, the steeper the curve. Get three or more analysts into a room together[…]

The fact that Google is looking for an alternative to 3rd Party HTTP Cookies isn’t such a surprise. The cookie retention curve has been under assault for a very long time. What is a surprise is that it made news.   Google makes most of it’s money from advertising Google makes the most money from advertising. It’s a giant arbitrage play between you, your attention, and what advertisers want you to pay attention to. Google may collect a lot of data about many things, but the most important data is about you, and the versions of you expressed through browsers and operating systems. The HTTP cookie was an important source of that information for a long time. It’s been expanding it’s[…]