Forrester

Forrester is the research and advisory firm George Colony founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1983, differentiated by a customer-first research lens: the Customer Experience Index linking CX quality to revenue, the Forrester Wave vendor evaluations (criteria scores published in a downloadable model), and — through its 2019 SiriusDecisions acquisition — the B2B revenue machinery (the demand waterfall, the messaging nomenclature) that runs inside most B2B marketing orgs.

Two franchises matter to marketers. The CX research gives customer-experience investment a financial argument (the index correlates CX scores with growth). And the SiriusDecisions inheritance is quietly everywhere in B2B — if your org speaks 'MQL to SQL conversion' and stages its funnel as a waterfall, it's running on frameworks Forrester now owns. The Wave's published scoring model also makes it the more transparent of the big-two vendor ratings.

Use the Wave's downloadable scorecard to re-weight criteria for YOUR requirements (the published model invites it — re-rank with your weights before shortlisting). Use the CX Index method to argue experience budgets in CFO language, and the B2B frameworks as shared vocabulary — while remembering frameworks describe the average org, and yours isn't average.

George Forrester Colony left a Harvard research role to found it in 1983, naming it with his own middle name; it rode the technographics wave of the 1990s, IPO'd in 1996, and bolted on the B2B layer by acquiring SiriusDecisions in 2019 for $245M.

Etymology: source.

Search interest for this term over the last five years:

View interest-over-time on Google Trends →

Areas of marketing where forrester is a core concern: