Marketing in the age of Data for a New Customer

http://forbesindia.com/blog/technology/marketing-in-the-age-of-data-for-a-new-customer/

The Future of marketing with respect to digitization and the complexity of analytics that are required to make sense of the data are already dominating our lives. A number of examples come to mind when I think of how the art of classic marketing is changing with time and transforming itself to leverage technologies and drive a clear business benefit as well as customer engagement.

My Favorite example is one of the early engagements that Starbucks launched online called “My Starbucks Idea”. It was a continuous engagement for co creation where customers and prospects propose ideas for new products, packaging, marketing etc. These are rated by others and best ones are awarded as well as the company uses them to transform business. Acting on that information and doing it publicly are keys to the success of this campaign which has already generated 70,000 ideas. Thinking of ways to build your company is great. But directly asking your consumers what they want is better - indeed awesome!

Fiat Group Automobiles needed to determine the likelihood that future and returning customers would buy specific brands and models of Fiat cars, so that individual dealers could optimize the use of available marketing funds. The company also needed to better understand customer experience with dealerships and repair facilities. Using statistics, they were better able to determine the likelihood that a customer will purchase a specific brand and model and the related timing of the purchase. This improved customer response rate to marketing initiatives by 15% – 20 %, customer loyalty by 7% especially when customers are ready to replace their existing one.

In February 2012, The New York Times published an article by Charles Duhigg (Doo-hig) titled, “How Companies Learn Your Secrets”. The story simultaneously captured the future of marketing, some very interesting possibilities for all of us marketers and most importantly, chilling risks about the new responsibilities in this era.

Marketing is indeed finding a way to serve various customer needs even before the customer can voice his exact requirement. Marketing is leading to a pre-emptive action to impress upon the customer and result in a meaningful transaction. A huge element of data analytics, customer buying patterns and past history is making marketers arrive at a more precise conclusion on a customer’s buying pattern.

Today’s marketing practice requires building this ability to understand customers as individuals across millions of interactions. And it sets the conditions for marketing to play new roles in driving business success. The key capabilities that marketers need to understand customers as individuals include:

1. Instrumenting all the key touch points to gather the right data on each customer

2. Interconnecting social media data, other forms of digital data and transaction data to paint a more vivid picture of each customer.

3. Run the right analytics, at the right time, on the right customer to generate new ideas about whom to serve and how to best serve that individual.

4. Generate insights in real time that are predictive, not just historical.

5. Build the capability to do this on a massive scale.

We all see that there is an unprecedented amount of data being gathered at every meaningful touch point about each customer. The best brands are very strategic about which touch points get instrumented, and what kind of data emerges as the result. Question to ask: what is your clients’ instrumentation strategy?

The most skilled companies are combining social data, other web-based data and transaction data—and running precise analytics over them to gain new kinds of insights. In this world, the path to success is largely dependent on having comprehensive access to the data. You need to formulate these insights and strategies to discern the veracity of that data. Question to ask: what is your client’s strategy for attracting data? 

And finally, what is your customer’s next likely move—so they can appropriately pair their response with the next best offer, next best action, next need etc. Question to ask: how predictive must your clients’ insights about customers be in order to succeed in their competitive market?

 -  By Sindhu Srinivas, Practice Leader – Marketing Consulting & Services, IBM India/South Asia.In my next post, I will share with you how new age data tools are being leveraged to help brands interact better with customers.

Read more: http://forbesindia.com/blog/technology/marketing-in-the-age-of-data-for-a-new-customer/#ixzz3Czr4toCk

Meet The Wearable Gadget That Outsources Your Personal Trainer To India

http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/03/17/meet-the-wearable-gadget-that-outsources-your-personal-trainer-to-india/

A simple problem has been stumping wearable device makers. Customers buy their shiny fitness trackers, show them off to friends, and then wear them religiously for maybe a month or two. Not long after, many get bored and throw the gadgets in a drawer. How do you motivate customers to keep wearing these wrist bands, to the point they might even pay for future services?

Fitbit thinks the answer is to share your fitness data with friends, stoking your competitive urges. Samsung has packed its Gear Fit with a sophisticated heart rate sensor. And well aware that most fitness trackers are ugly, Jawbone offers a more stylish alternative with the Up.

None of these approaches involve connecting you to another human being.

Menlo Park-based GOQii thinks the answer lies in using real, live personal trainers, and crucially, it can get them for low prices by outsourcing to Mumbai, India.

GOQii gives its trackers away for free, and charges $99 for a six-month service of daily texting with a coach that analyzes users’ data, and calls them once a month.

Gondal says the cost of hiring and training remote coaches is ‘far higher’ than manufacturing

 GOQii’s fitness tracker in Shenzen, China; image via GOQii

Gaming entrepreneur and GOQii founder Vishal Gondal got the idea two years ago when his own personal trainer started looking at his Fitbit data to help him set reasonable goals, and eventually set Gondal on the path to running half marathons.

Today Gondal shows off the messages from his new personal trainer, a full-time GOQii coach in Mumbai named Swapnil. Earlier this morning he texted Gondal via the GOQii app on his phone to ask how he’d slept.

“Feeling tired,” Gondal had replied. “Should I get a Red Bull ?”

“No,” Swapnil answered, adding that Gondal should try drinking some natural carrot juice with a shot of ginger.

There’s one last message from the coach: “Did you get time for a run?” Swapnil can’t read Gondal’s GPS data, but can see that he hasn’t taken very many steps that day.

Gondal now looks sheepish. “I haven’t run so I haven’t replied to the message. This is playing in my mind that I have to reply.” He stares at the message for a moment. “Ok I’ll tell him now.” Gondal’s thumbs fly across his Nokia phone. “Yes. Running tomorrow for sure,” he tells Swapnil.

It’s arguably easy to brush off a coach that’s thousands of miles away, but Gondal insists his coaches don’t use scripts or boilerplate answers, and are encouraged to be themselves. The idea is to create a bond with their users strong enough to play on their minds, as Gondal’s did. Each coach will eventually have between 100 and 150 customers to look after.

GOQii’s Mumbai team of roughly 50 coaches work from 10am till 6pm in an open-plan office filled with gym equipment, organic food and spaces to do high-intensity workouts like tabata, but they spend most of their time staring a numbers and charts for user steps and calorie intake.

Each coach has a background in personal fitness and has spent around two months studying a 118-page manual with chapters on nutrition and even cognitive behavioral therapy.

From this April, they’ll start coaching around 1,000 people in India, all taking part in a beta phase for GOQii. The company plans to start selling its service in the United States at the end of this year, likely for more than what it charges in India, and by then have hundreds of coaches.

Remote fitness coaching is nothing new. Sessions, which connects users with individual trainers, recently got bought out by MyFitnessPal. Chicago-based RetroFit also pairs fitness and nutrition experts with customers, but it charges a minimum $250 per month. Gondal keeps costs low by capitalizing on the experience of local staff in “business process outsourcing,” hiring managers in India from IBM IBM +1.98% and Wipro WIT +1.87%.

“It’s the perfect combination of man and machine,” he says. One other intriguing part of GOQii is its philanthropic play. Users earn one “karma” point for every 350 steps taken, and when donated to a charity like Oxfam the points are converted into cash, thanks to a cadre of corporate and individual donors. “When you do something for others you feel a lot more satisfied,” Gondal says. “That’s why you see people doing marathons supporting causes.”

GOQii has raised “a few million” in angel funding from names like Amit Singhal, Google’s head of search, and Flextronics CEO Mike McNamara, and Gondal is working his Valley networks to raise a Series A round. “Our challenge is not hardware but getting the training done.”

Indeed, the GOQii device itself is a relatively ordinary plastic wrap-around band with a small, pop-out screen that shows a count for calories and steps, manufactured in Shenzen, China. It costs Gondal far more to train his coaches than make the device, which seems to act as a showcase more than anything for the training system. Eventually, Gondal wants his coaches to be monitoring customers via Fitbits, Galaxy Fits and the health-focused wrist band that Apple is expected to launch in the coming months.

“In the future we’re going to have a tsunami of personal data coming up,” Gondal says. “We’re creating a new breed of professionals whose job is to decipher human data and guide people.”