Umbria acquired by J.D. Power

Congratulations in order this morning to Janet, Howard, and the rest of the team at Umbria.  The brand monitoring firm was acquired today by J.D. Power & Associates, the customer satisfaction research company.

The significance of this acquisition lies in the acquirer - McGraw-Hill/JDPower is different type of company than Nielsen and TNS - and will use brand monitoring differently.  One thing in common - another brand monitoring brand name disappears.  Umbria will be folded into their new parent company, while Buzzmetrics/Intelliseek have disappeared into Nielsen Online and Cymfony now operates as part of TNS media.

I have a short research piece publishing soon for Forrester clients.

Comments

[Sid Banerjee]

There's no question that the blogmining/brand monitoring startups are starting to become subsumed into marketing services organizations. Witness:

- Buzzmetrics into Neilsen
- Cymphony into TNS

However, there's a potentially much larger, more vibrant text mining space that I think has the potential to support a much larger vendor ecosystem and pure play companies who remain independent.

Blogmining firms such as the ones mentioned above mainly crawl, analyze, and distill content from the blogosphere.

Firms that harness customer generated content from both INSIDE the enterprise (ie internal call center transcripts, internally generated survey responses to open ended questions, support emails, chats), and who fuse those insights with external content from blogs, forums, moderated newsgrops, and web 2.0 sites have the ability to construct a much more detailed undertanding not just of BRAND, but of customer product and service EXPERIENCE.

Customer Experience Intelligence is more useful to most corporations that simply blogmining-based brand monitoring services like Umbria and Buzzmetrics. While brand monitoring is valuable to marketing, campaign management, and product management organizations, when you layer in the insights of customer experience data the solutions become desirable to many more operational functions in a company, including Sales (why are we winning, losing), Customer Support (what customer support experiences breed loyalty/encourage churn), Product Engineering (what bugs, features need to be addressed). As a result of the larger addressible marketplace, the Customer Experience Intelligence marketplace is bigger, more dynamic, and more likely to breed independent vendors who partner (vs get acquired by) a diverse range of firms including marketing services companies, database platform vendors, analytical tool vendors, and even data syndicators, but who remain proudly independent.

Full disclosure - I am the CEO of one of the leading Customer Experience Intelligence vendors, Clarabridge. We partner with TNS (in spite of the Cympony acquisition), and have sold Customer experience solutions that tap into customer experience content) at United Airlines, Marriott, Gap Stores, Gaylord Hotels, and others.

Sid - www.clarabridge.com

[David Rabjohns]

'I have a short research piece publishing soon for Forrester clients.'

hi Peter, What will the research cover?

David

[Peter Kim]

Hi David - it's a short summary of thoughts about how the brand monitoring industry has changed over the past two years - which has implications for how firms should be evaluated going forward.

Sid - weren't we supposed to talk at some point? I think you need to look more closely at the competition. Nielsen told me that they can and do incorporate internal content into their analysis; so does TNS.

[Sid Banerjee]

Peter - I look forward to catching up - we'll reach out to you through formal Forrester channels next week. We have some exciting product and customer news, and we'd love to set up a formal briefing.

We can discuss the details surrounding Clarabridge vis a vis TNS, Nielsen, etc when we speak.

Regards,

Sid.

[David Rabjohns]

I bought the piece. I was a good read and very timely. Thanks for the mention.

Cheers

David

[David Rabjohns]

At least I bought a piece "Agencies Must Build Digital Skills To Survive" was this it?

[Peter Kim]

Hi - it isn't out yet...glad you found the Agency piece interesting though. I expect that it will publish this week with the title "New Uses For Brand Monitoring."

[Peter Kim]

P.S. Forrester has a money back guarantee:

http://www.forrester.com/Becomeaclient