Data equity will rival brand equity in the days to come: Ajay Kelkar, Co-Founder & COO of Hansa Cequity

Data is like “footprints” that customers are leaving behind! Data is all around us, but it needs to be made sense of. Data analytics, a fast emerging discipline, is fast emerging as a tool to mine the data and slice it scientifically to arrive at meaningful insights that can help take better marketing decisions. Banking and financial services, retail, airlines are some of the categories utilizing data analytics across the globe and in India as well – for eg. HDFC Bank, Shoppers Stop, Jet Airways, amongst others. Ajay Kelkar, Co-Founder & COO of Hansa Cequity shares with Amit Bapna the trends in this relatively new discipline and how it can be used effectively by marketers for having more cost-effective marketing programs.

Why does it make sense for brands to look at this form of marketing more rigorously?

How companies store, transform & use their data will become as potent a marketing tool as the brand’s equity itself! Companies have huge amounts of data now and there is technology & skill sets available to decode it. Data Equity will rival Brand equity in the days to come! Increasingly India is becoming a Service economy, but our marketing mindset is still manufacturing. We have over 600 million customers who are on some customer database either of a Telco, Bank, Retailer or Travel company. These customers are “addressable media” because we know them by name and understand their behavior patterns. If used powerfully enough, data about a customer can transform the customer experience! When a bank calls you just when you have made that “high value, jewellery” purchase on your credit card, is an example of data driving a customer experience. You are immediately relived that your bank will be alert if your card gets into the wrong hands! Every customer has potential: Your best customers have the potential to leave; your marginal customers have the potential to buy more; and other consumers have the potential to buy. A carefully crafted relationship marketing strategy, coupled with a customer-centric focus from your front-line sales associates, will bring marketing and service closer together. The end result should be sustainable, long-term growth one customer at a time.


Which are some of the brands that have adopted it with success? What have been some of the obstacles in its robust growth?

Financial services & retail have been 2 industries that have built competency in this space.

One often reads about "power brands" and how some of the larger FMCG companies have tried to pull out of the recession by focusing on these brands. But isn't it time for businesses to look for "power customers" - who contribute disproportionately to the company's topline and profits. But to put in place a "power customer strategy" needs companies to think analytically about individual customers and not amorphous masses. By far the most neglected aspect of extracting value from transaction data-and one of the most important factors in building a firm’s analytic capabilities-is the organizational and cultural context needed to support data driven marketing. The leader needs to have the "feather touch" to navigate the political mine field as she navigates towards a data driven marketing culture!

So what does analytics need for a more robust growth trajectory?

Analytics needs an evangelist! Without such a person, you just don’t get the impact that Analytics actually is capable of providing! Mostly this evangelist needs to be right at the top, the CEO! Without him Analytics can get buried as yet another "sexy" initiative, which went wrong! One organization, which has become a huge case study in the application of a “fact” based approach to business, is Harrah’s Entertainment!

How has data analytics emerged globally? What about the Indian growth story? Despite being awash in data, many organizations are data rich but insight poor. In a recent survey we found 80 percent of companies reporting that they didn’t have a beneficial, consistently updated, companywide analytical capability. Among major decisions, only 20-25 percent was backed by analytics—75-80 percent was made by intuition and gut instinct. Tesco, for instance, generates more than 1.5 billion new items of data every month. Wal-Mart’s warehouse now includes some 2.5 petabytes of information, the equivalent of roughly half of all the letters delivered by the US Postal Service in 2010.

India has more than 600 million customers on some database! Companies are in hyper growth mode & industries like Banking, Retail, and DTH & TELECOM have millions of customers.

What does the future look like?

Technology is getting more affordable & companies are awash with data. The stage is clearly set for marketing to become more accountable by using analytics in its arsenal. The key to making analytics matter from a business context is to embed it into your day-to-day business processes. Till you do that Analytics will be a nice luxury, used more to justify decisions that the “gut” seems to support!