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How marketing analytics will shape up in 2014 – a SIBIA perspective

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From gut-feel marketing to data-driven analytical solutions, India is on a fast track towards unlocking the value of the customer for maximum ROI and effective business strategy. The traditional format of marketing that toed the line espoused by empanelled advertising agencies and in-house marketing departments, has made a tectonic shift at both the tactical and strategic levels. While C-level executives (the CIOs, CXOs, CIOs. CMOs) are applying marketing analytics to make informed decisions across domains like branding, pricing or CRM, they are also unlocking the 360 degree view of the customer to influence customer behaviour.

With India’s brand awareness and global positioning growing phenomenally, there has been a distinctive change from the ‘reactive’ to the ‘proactive’ – made possible with data collected at every point. As marketing analytics transmutes from a descriptive to an executive model, data driven decisions are no longer a competitive advantage for a business but a necessity.

Marketing lies at the core of a business, and building up an effective Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI) is critical to an organisation’s ROI and business growth. This has been grasped by the marketers as wells as the top tier executives. They are fast adopting marketing analytics across various marketing sub-functions and upgrading their IT infrastructure to integrate complex data and analytics solutions.

According to a collaborative report by NASSCOM

“The Indian marketing analytics industry is expected to grow from its present value of $200 million to $1.2 billion in 2020 at a compounded annual growth rate of 25 per cent.”

India already has a headstart as a leading analytics provider with IT/KPO/BPO firms providing analytics as part of their portfolio on one hand and the pure-play analytics firms on the other, leveraging global vendor products customised to client requirements. For fast moving industries like the CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods), Retail and F&B (Food & Beverages) aiming to capture the maximum market share, marketing analytics has already become the backbone. Every day, the advantages of marketing analytics is being felt across industry verticals and applications areas as the consumer landscape evolves rapidly.

Top 10 Trends in marketing analytics in 2014

Niche solutions and products in marketing analytics – CRM Analytics (implemented by Tata Motors), Marketing Mix Modeling (MacDonald’s, Air India, Cadbury India), Customer Retention Analytics (Fiat group)
A shift from applying off-the-shelf global vendor products customized to client TO home-grown solutions and products catering to market situations typical to Indian scenario
Increased application of marketing analytics in B2B marketing
Upswing in Digital marketing and analytics, as enterprises connect to their stakeholders
Big Data Marketing analytics in real-time and enterprise wide deployment
Marketing Analytics solutions embedded within the business IT infrastructure
Increased R&D as CMOs and CXOs harness the value of managing and analyzing both structured and unstructured data
Banking, retail and FMCG industries - the early adaptors of Big Data, will be able to connect to customers better, and have an effective ROMI
A move towards cloud or hybrid models with on-premise or software based big data solutions - as enterprises in India lean towards cloud computing as a viable, mainstream solution for both data management and analytics
BI services that synergize a multi-disciplinary approach

What does this mean for big industries and SMEs?

Industries or SMEs are able to choose from the diverse range of niche analytics solutions to suit their budgetary allocation, problem to be redressed or workflow management.

Companies, especially SMEs will be able to leverage marketing analytics solutions, with cost-effective locally developed and customized offerings. There will be reduced dependency on global vendor products

While web platforms and social media engagement by enterprises will support increase in digital data, e-commerce platforms will add on to customer engagement for a 360 degree view of the customer.

SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud) will become the benchmark for both, understanding new release / brand response (reactive) and engaging customer sentiments for product modification, aggressive marketing and pricing strategies (proactive), to name a few instances. We can already see the practice where unstructured data is being synergized with structured data for integrated analytical solutions. Social media and mobile engagement will become core to marketing analytics.

As customer data across social media, mobile, e-commerce and promotional campaigns keeps piling, the 3 Vs of Big Data (volume, variety, velocitywill increase phenomenally. Such Big Data will call for suitable database management or cloud deployment, for deriving deep insights in real-time. Analytics will be deployed more and more across various sections or departments for a cross-functional multi-disciplinary approach to decision making based on predictive and prescriptive analytics (predicting customer demand during certain months, suggesting optimal pricing, and so on)
As a result, companies of all sizes will be looking at indigenously developed marketing analytics solutions to cater to their needs in the Indian business dynamics. Start-up analytic firms with the three essential pillars of marketing intelligence – domain /market expertise, statistical analysis, solution implementation – can be expected to be in higher demand. Pure-play analytics firms are fast transmuting the business landscape in India, as start-ups stand shoulder to shoulder in analytics delivery with large IT firms.
As marketing analytics lifecycle progresses from simple reporting to complex optimization, the 3 Vs of marketing (value exploration, value creation, value delivery) will be more effectual with the delivery of robust marketing analytics solutions.

Analytics value exploration - how can a firm identify new value opportunities? Value creation - how can a company create promising new value offerings?

Value delivery - how can a company use its capabilities and infrastructure to deliver new value offerings more efficiently?

Besides an exponential increase in marketing analytics application amongst B2C marketers, B2B groups are also implementing predictive analytics to provide double digit increases in leads, opportunities and sales. The year 2014 will also be the year when digital marketing analytics will be widely implemented.

The need for embedding various analytic solutions within existing applications and IT platforms is going to place high expectations of marketing analytics providers, to provide highly intuitive solutions which can be implemented across the organisation’s IT infrastructure seamlessly.
With Big Data implementation in large organizations, a robust back-end IT infrastructure will become a necessity to leverage real-time digital data and other emerging technology platforms. Analytics solutions will necessarily be technology enabled.
The many channels of data, their volume and velocity need to be manipulated for actionable insights by end users. So during 2014marketing analytics will increasingly veer towards the intelligent and plug and play models for quick decisions.

The year of 2014 is going to witness a dramatic change in the Indian Marketing Analytics landscape as solutions become more intuitive, scalable and IT supportive.

KEYWORDS – marketing analytics, how, 2014, SIBIA perspective, Indian marketing analytics industry, report by NASSCOM, top 10 trends, industries, SMEs, customer data, niche marketing analytics solutions, marketing mix modeling, 3 Vs of marketing, ROMI, 360 degree view of customer.

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