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In 2011, we saw Market Insights Professionals take their first steps on the path to adding social to their research mix, measuring their contribution to the organization, fostering internal collaboration, and building influence.

Near field communication (NFC) allows consumers to use their mobile and custom devices to directly interact with almost any real-world object such as posters, clothes, and shop windows. The allure of NFC is its simplicity: Users tap their device (most likely a mobile) on the object of interest and are immediately provided with either media or a campaign message and action. This report provides interactive marketers an appreciation of how NFC differs from other offline technologies, an outline of campaign techniques, and a tool kit to help them approach their construction of high-impact NFC campaigns.

CCP Games, a massive multiplayer online game provider, knew that its existing approach with key channels like display was suboptimized and that it could drive more efficient customer acquisition if it got smarter about media mix and management of its first-party data. For help it turned to X Plus One, a demand-side platform (DSP) with extensive data management platform (DMP) capabilities. Together they spent 2010 and 2011 moving CCP from a messy, duplicative approach rife with waste to a lean, focused, optimized media mix, and in 2012 aim to leverage CCP's existing data assets for highly efficient cross-sell. Along the way, they're co-creating a universal view of "the truth," improving CCP's internal processes and communications.

Forrester partnered with the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) to better understand marketers' current attitudes toward TV and digital video advertising. Marketers have regained their confidence in TV advertising since the recession and look forward to the promise of applying targeting and segmentation to their TV campaigns. This report explains the perspectives of the largest consumer and business marketers and outlines some of the key trends marketers need to watch as TV continues to evolve as a media platform.

Online retail sales will continue to outperform overall retail sales figures in terms of percentage growth for many years to come in Europe. As the Web becomes an increasingly mainstream part of the lives of many Europeans, eBusiness professionals must adapt their strategies to accommodate consumers who are finding information about products and services across multiple touchpoints. This report outlines the five-year growth projections for online retail sales across 17 European countries in total and provides specific details for major markets like the UK, France, and Germany.

eCommerce sales continue to grow rapidly, having topped $200 billion in 2011. Forrester expects that online sales will grow from 7% of overall retail sales to close to 9% by 2016. Key drivers of this growth include consumers' greater comfort level with purchasing various categories online, broader web shopping capabilities with mobile and tablet devices, innovative new shopping models that divert spend away from physical stores (e.g., flash sales, subscription models), online loyalty programs, and aggressive promotional offers from web retailers.

Adoption of social media among investors is relatively high, but many investment firms have been slow to embrace the medium. The Vanguard Group has had success by using social media to engage with and learn from its clients and now feels that it has a better sense of what clients want to hear from Vanguard. In the past five months, its Facebook and Twitter audience has nearly tripled. By using the people, objectives, strategy, and technology (POST) methodology, other investment firms could enjoy similar success.

Are you confident that you have all the right agencies doing all the right things? We have entered a period of digital adolescence where all of your agencies are digitizing their core capabilities regardless of medium or service.

Market insights professionals are tasked with understanding how consumer preferences and emotions play a role in their decisions and influence their choices. However, these factors typically occur within the subconscious part of the brain, an area that traditional research methods can't reveal. Neuroscience techniques have the ability to gain access to this powerful part of the mind and provide unique insights into a consumer's subconscious motivations, emotions, and cognition. This set of techniques can serve a niche but valuable role in the research process, in combination with traditional research methods. Market insights professionals need to understand the benefits and challenges of neuroscience techniques before they add this to their research mix.

IT infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders spend nearly 25% of their IT hardware budget on workforce computing hardware. However, Forrester finds that these priorities and budgets favor security and efficiency that don't align with the expectations of empowered employees for improved choice and user experience. It's imperative that I&O budget holders get this right in 2012 as heightening user frustrations with the corporate PC coincide with new PC and tablet hardware architectures, client virtualization, bring-your-own-PC programs, and Windows 7 rollouts. This report provides guidance for I&O executives looking to set their workforce computing hardware budgets for the remainder of 2012. It's designed to help I&O execs understand what's changing that will affect budgets and make better trade-offs to preserve flexibility and choice for their internal customers.

One of the challenges that market insights professionals struggle with is the communication of research results across the organization. The Customer Experience and NPS team at Philips was tasked with promoting Net Promoter Score (NPS) to the global organization. After looking into a number of options, the team decided to opt for eLearning with a twist — using humor as a way to communicate and train. Philips developed a short, interactive quiz with Jellyvision Lab that explains the basics of NPS and delivers a "sticky message." Within six months, more than 16,000 employees had taken the training, with very positive results. Next steps include adding more interactivity to the module and launching new promotion activities.

After a record year for claims, a continued poor investment climate, and an economy mired in the doldrums, rates in the US for auto and especially homeowners insurance have no place to go but up. With six quarters of rising premiums being served up by insurers now, consumers are going online to shop for the best insurance deals. It comes as no surprise that price is the primary impetus for switching insurers. But it is surprising that an insurer's newest customers — ones who've been customers for less than a year — are the ones most likely to elope with the competition, sometimes resulting in relationships more fleeting than Kim Kardashian's marriage. This report examines which customers are more likely to be shopping and why, and it outlines five strategies that insurance eBusiness teams can employ to capture and keep customers' attention to prevent them from defecting to the competition.

The notion of a "safe haven" in customer intelligence (CI) isn't new; for years, direct marketers and catalogers have relied on cooperatives for their customer acquisition needs. But in the digital landscape, safe havens have taken on a new significance and are expanding to fill two crucial needs: improving targeting and developing a more complete view of the customer. This report examines the new models and the factors driving their development and highlights where Forrester sees their place in the CI landscape.