Forrester’s Q3 2006 Brand Monitoring Wave is now live

I began working on the brand monitoring Wave in May and wrapped up the research with publication of the documents today.  More on the process and a pretty picture of the results on the Forrester Marketing blog.  More on the personal side of the process here.

The Wave is a quite intensive piece of research.  It’s very process-driven which is good in some ways, bad in others.  The process makes for a very rigorous analysis.  It also means that there’s very little time for other activities when you’ve got one in progress.  I ran in-person "lab" evaluations with each of the seven vendors.  I made 17 client reference calls with existing and former accounts.  I also developed the 56 evaluation criteria (with vendor input) and scales, scoring each vendor and backing it up with written analysis.  These scorecards turned into longer written documents in addition to the "long doc" that describes the brand monitoring market and process.  Moreover, there was discussion at each step of the way with vendors regarding their scores and my analysis, whether fact- or opinion-based.  It adds up pretty quickly.

As a result, I’m looking forward to taking a real vacation!  Haven’t had a full week off yet this year…

Being: Peter Kim