The Forrester Customer Intelligence Forum and the Forrester Marketing Leadership Forums will soon be here.  This year’s events will be co-located on April 18-19 at the J.W. Marriott at the L.A. Live entertainment complex in downtown Los Angeles.  Last year’s Marketing Forum was quite memorable for me.  You see, while Forrester analysts and business marketers were busy mingling over at the Marriott, another marketing powerhouse was taking up residence a few feet away at The Staples Center.  That’s right folks. Lada Gaga was coming to town.  And, as I came to learn, it made perfect sense for Lady Gaga and her legions of fans to be sharing a small patch of downtown L.A. with marketing leaders from all over the world.  After all, whether you like Lady Gaga or not, what pop star in recent memory has done more to build herself into a brand and to create an engaging, social and interactive customer experience for her Little Monsters?  While Lady Gaga won’t be back in town for this year’s Forrester events, there are still plenty of compelling reasons to make the trip out to Los Angeles.  

•    How can you assess consumer uptake of new innovations?
•    How do you build deep customer knowledge to drive competitive advantage?
•    How do you drive deep, personalized customer engagement?
•    What is more valuable — eyeballs or engagement?
•    How do business customers engage in new media types?
•    How can you tie social data to corporate data?
•    Who should lead the movement to customer obsession?
•    How should you shift your planning and measurement approaches to accommodate more data and a higher signal-to-noise ratio?
•    What role does technology play in customizing and synchronizing marketing efforts across channels?

As a platinum sponsor of the event, there will be a numbers of ways to interact with Oracle while you’re attending the Forums.  Here are some of the highlights:

Oracle Speaking Session
Thursday, April 19, 9:15am – 9:55am
Maximize Customer Engagement and Retention with Integrated Marketing & Loyalty
Melissa Boxer, Vice President, Oracle CRM Marketing & Loyalty

Customers expect to interact with your company, brand and products in more ways than ever before.   New devices and channels, such as mobile, social and web, are creating radical shifts in the customer buying process and the ways your company can reach and communicate with existing and potential customers. While Marketing's objectives (attract, convert, retain) remain fundamentally the same, your approach and tools must adapt quickly to succeed in this more complex, cross-channel world. Hear how leading brands are using Oracle's integrated marketing and loyalty solutions to maximize customer engagement and retention through better planning, execution, and measurement of synchronized cross-channel marketing initiatives.

Solution Showcase
Wednesday, April 18
10:20am – 11:50am
12:30pm – 1:30pm
2:55pm – 3:40pm

Thursday, April 19
9:55am – 10:40am
12:00pm – 1:00pm

Solution Showcase & Networking Reception
Wednesday, April 18
5:10pm – 6:20pm

Be sure to follow the #webcenter hashtag for updates on these events.  And for a more considered perspective on what Lady Gaga can teach businesses about branding and customer experience, check out Denise Lee Yohn’s post, Lessons from Lady Gaga from the Brand as Business Bites blog.