absolutdata Intelligent Analytics International Youth Centre, Teen Murti Marg, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi - 110 021, India Phone: 91-11-23010199, Fax: 91-11-23015452, Email: research@nasscom.in Website: www.nasscom.in Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 2 Copyright 2012 International Youth Centre, Teen Murti Marg, Chanakyapuri New Delhi - 110 021, India Phone: 91-11-23010199, Fax: 91-11-23015452 Email: research@nasscom.in Published by NASSCOM, New Delhi Designed & Produced by CREATIVE INC. Phone: 91-11-41634301 Printed at P.S. Press Services Disclaimer The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. NASSCOM disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. NASSCOM shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in the information contained herein, or for interpretations thereof. The material in this publication is copyrighted. No part of this report can be reproduced either on paper or electronic media without permission in writing from NASSCOM. Request for permission to reproduce any part of the report may be sent to NASSCOM. Usage of Information Forwarding/copy/using in publications without approval from NASSCOM will be considered as infringement of intellectual property rights. Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 3 Over the past decades marketing has played a critical role in the success of companies. No one questions its impact on iconic brands such as Coca Cola, Apple, Kraft Cheese, Nike and Disney. Marketing has not only helped sell products but also inform companies about what consumers want and what they do not want. Marketing Analytics has played a pivotal role in doing so, by helping marketers take informed data-driven decisions. This study by NASSCOM and AbsolutData is an efort to highlight the pivotal role of Marketing Analytics, and the opportunities, challenges and future trends associated with it for Indian service providers. Marketing analytics enables C-Level executives to make data driven decisions in a complex environment where the speed, volume and complexity of data have increased exponentially over the years. We have seen marketing analytics solutions evolve from being used for post mortem analysis (Descriptive analytics) to being used for real time decision making (Executive analytics). Though Marketing Analytics is poised for exponential growth, there will be some teething problems, such as shortage of trained talent, high attrition, and rapid changes in the technology landscape. Players need to be inventive and forward looking and look to devise new strategies to counter these problems while continuing to innovate solutions. India is the cynosure for analytics players and has a head start over other outsourcing destinations such as China, as a number of analytics rms started operations here much earlier. India also has a signicant advantage due to its inexpensive labour, which is malleable and can be trained easily in analytics skills. With the advent of new technologies and myriad sources of consumer awareness, the scope of marketing analytics will be vast and India will be one of the foremost forces leading the analytics revolution. By the help of this study, we hope to display the potential of this sector to client organizations, analytics players and prospective employees and hope that it will pave the way for constructed eforts to further the cause of marketing analytics in India. Foreword Anil Kaul CEO AbsolutData Som Mittal President NASSCOM Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 4 Marketing Analytics is a strategic necessity for CXOs Companies are increasingly using the insights derived from marketing analytics to gain competitive advantage. This has made CXOs realise the necessity of using marketing analytics in building strategy. CMOs and Business heads are struggling to deal with the increased complexity in the current consumer environment. This has caused them to utilize marketing analytics for their strategic and tactical decision making. Marketing analytics is viewed as an enterprise wide function which interacts with various departments across the organization. Organizations are looking for analytical solutions which can be integrated within their IT infrastructure. India is scaling up rapidly as a Marketing Analytics delivery Hub India has a distinct advantage in delivering analytics with an abundant supply of trainable, cost efective analytics talent and extensive analytics delivery experience. The Indian marketing analytics industry is expected to grow from USD 200 Million to USD 1.2 Billion in 2020, at a CAGR of 25%. Players are faced with enormous challenges and opportunities due to the rapidly evolving consumer landscape Due to the rapidly evolving consumer landscape, digital and big data analytics are becoming increasingly relevant in decision making. These advances enable real time analytics, which is becoming a necessity in modern marketing landscape. This presents enormous challenges and opportunities for industry players. Players need to develop new skills and solutions to service client needs. There is a shortage of analytics talent globally. According to a Mckinsey report on Big Data, the shortage for deep analytics talent within US alone is expected to be around 140,000-190,000 by 2018. To overcome this, players need a disaggregated approach to leverage talent with optimal onshore-ofshore mix. There is a need to train and retain talent to keep attrition costs under control. Government and players need to be proactive for India to realise its marketing analytics potential The fast growing analytics industry needs the government to set up better academic institutions and programs for analytics to help it in its burgeoning talent requirement. Additionally, the analytics industry needs nancial assistance similar to what as was ofered to IT players in the past decades. Indian analytics players need to be competitive and scale up operations to service global analytical demands. They need to build distinctive IP and productized solutions to obtain competitive advantage. Rigorous training programs and efective employee engagement programs should be set up for faster on-boarding and talent retention. Additionally, Indian players need to come together to increase Indias brand awareness and positioning globally. Executive Summary Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 5 Acknowledgements 6 Marketing Analytics Overview 7 Key Trends: Marketing Analytics Increasing in Importance 17 Key Challenges for Industry Players 41 Way Forward 53 Company Proles: Solution and Service Providers 61 Case Studies 81 Contents Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 6 This report was co-developed by NASSCOM and AbsolutData through a comprehensive two month study to understand the marketing analytics industry within India and how service providers could prepare better to exploit opportunities in the long term. We would like to thank various people for their valuable contributions without which this report would not have been possible. First, we would like to thank member companies of NASSCOM, who went out of their way to provide detailed inputs and perspectives for their companies and clients/markets. We would like to acknowledge inputs from Cognizant, Fidelity, FMR, Forrester, Frost and Sullivan, Genpact, HCL, HP, Mu Sigma, Thomas Davenport and company websites. A special thanks to the panel members, including Arnab Chakraborty, Pratul Chopra and Subinder Khurana. We would also like to thank AbsolutData leadership and subject matter experts including Abishek Sawhny, Anil Kaul, Sudeshna Datta, Suhale Kapoor, and Sundar Ramaswamy for their constant guidance, market insights and support on this project. We would like to acknowledge the contributions of the AbsolutData working team led by Sundar Ramaswamy including Aviral Mathur, Guha Athreya, Heather Kluter, Hem Chander, Imran Saeed, Kunal Jain, Sayan Banerjee, Shayak Roy, Titir Pal, Vamsi Krishna, Yaamini Sharma and the NASSCOM team led by Achyuta Ghosh, in their eforts and contribution in putting this report together. Acknowledgements Marketing Analytics Overview Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 8 Marketing Analytics Overview 1 Marketing Analytics enable CMOs to make data driven decisions 2 Marketing Analytics provide solutions to a range of business questions 3 Marketing Analytics solutions have evolved from Descriptive to Executive 4 Global Analytics Marketplace is still evolving Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 9 Marketing Analytics enable CMOs to make data-driven decisions In todays competitive landscape, where customers can make informed decision regarding their purchases, there is a steady increase in the amount of data that captures these purchase patterns. A large quantum of data is also being generated through the web and the internal IT systems. These data play an integral part in understanding the psyche of the consumer, which helps organisations develop the most saleable products and market them efectively. Given the widespread availability of data, the need to make data-driven decisions is no longer just a competitive advantage, but a necessity. Marketing Analytics can be applied across various Marketing sub-functions In sales and marketing functions, there is a range of strategic and tactical issues that need to be addressed and the CMOs need more than just gut feeling and experience to do that. Today, CMOs are left with no choice but to apply Marketing Analytics at all levels across various sub-functions of the marketing domain such as branding, pricing and promotions, CRM, sales and distribution and product development. Marketing Analytics helps solve problems related to branding to cut through the clutter of me-too competitive brands, helping organisations conceptualise new products and service oferings to target the untapped market gaining an edge over competition in the process. It is helping the CMOs understand Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 10 and prole their customers and cater the right ofers for each of them by cultivating the data. Also, it helps drive sales in diferent channels by optimising trade incentives to suppliers and distributors. Marketing Analytics answers tactical and strategic business questions Decisions taken by a CMO lie on a broad spectrum, ranging from tactical to strategic in nature. On the tactical side, decisions are generally more reactive than proactive, and help improve marketing performance in the near term. Strategically, they are proactive and sophisticated in nature and have a much greater impact on marketing performance. It is not limited to the current marketing vision or activity but takes a more expansive view of what type of marketing can be used to obtain favourable results. Sales and Marketing Analytics can be applied more efectively these days, not only to understand consumer behaviour but also to inuence it. Online retail websites are leading the way by conducting real-time analysis on the customer data to inuence their decisions. Their recommendation engines utilise complex statistical algorithms and customers browsing patterns to predict products that may be of interest to them. Marketing Analytics impacts both top line and bottom line In the modern competitive markets, CMOs need to develop stronger, deeper relationship with their customer base. Marketing Analytics is a tool CMOs use to understand their customers and the choices they make in a holistic fashion. This increased understanding helps them make better decisions directly impacting the top line. With increasingly stagnant markets focus has shifted on RoI; CMOs are being measured against the monetary impact of their marketing eforts and spends. Quantiable results is the new rule for them, across all the sales and marketing sub-functions. Marketing Analytics can be applied to optimise external and internal spend which has a direct impact on an organisations bottom line. Applying Marketing Analytics in branding gives a deep insight into the composition of the customer base, their needs, optimal messaging and required spend on branding. This knowledge can be used to carry out targeted branding campaigns and build strong brand equity. Strong brand equity directly results in increase of revenue and subsequently the top line. On the other hand, application of Marketing Analytics in sales and distribution provides insights on the optimal trade channels to distribute products, which and how much trade incentives are required, and how to distribute. This helps the organisation optimise their expenses and increase the bottom line. Marketing Analytics can also be used internally within the organisation to optimise the workforces eforts. For instance, sales force efectiveness analysis understands the gaps of the sales force, helps formulate strategies to overcome gaps, improve productivity and sales, track RoI of the sales force and helps formulate strategies for constant improvement of the workforce. This helps in increasing the bottom line of the organisation by increasing internal ef ciency. Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 11 Marketing Analytics solutions have evolved from Descriptive to Executive Marketing Analytics solutions help understand past as well as predict future. These solutions range from simple reporting to complex optimisation To devise marketing strategy and tactics, it is vital for CXOs to know two things. Firstly, a thorough understanding of the past is vital in understanding the success or failure of the marketing tactics. Secondly, ability to accurately predict the future consequences of the actions would help in devising the ideal strategy for the organisation. While the marketing sub-functions are very diverse, there are common trends as far as the analytical lifecycle goes. The entire lifecycle can be broken down in four progressive steps what happened (Reporting), why did it happen (Analysing), what will happen next (Predicting) and how to maximise results (Optimising). While reporting and analysing helps CMOs understand what happened in the past, predicting and optimising helps predict and plan for the future. For instance, in the CRM sub-function, a typical requirement is promotional campaign analysis. CMOs are interested in knowing the efectiveness of the campaign in garnering additional sales as well as in improving brand visibility. Data obtained is in the form of customer response to the campaign and increase in volume and sales due to the campaign. Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 12 The campaign data is reported using dashboards (Reporting) which would provide a picture of what transpired. Thorough examination of the data would provide insights on what worked well, what didnt and the RoI of the campaign (Analysing). Analytics is like a crystal ball for CMOs as it can enable them to view the expected future results as a consequence of the campaign (Prediction). Critical questions like what can be cross/up-sold to the present customer base are answered on the basis of the campaign responses. Lastly, analytics can help CMOs gain the most out of the campaigns by either optimising the campaign ofers or the segments of people to be contacted (Optimisation). Solutions are delivered through a combination of technology, technical and domain skills There are three main stages in the execution of Marketing Analytics understanding business problem(s), executing statistical analysis and implementing the solution. Understanding business problem(s) is a key step to help determine the best analytical approach and typically the most dif cult one. One needs to have a thorough understanding of the client domain and the market, in order to generate the best analytics solution in context of the business problems. The next step of execution involves data manipulation and running statistical analyses on them. Typically, players use of-the-shelf software solutions like SPSS, SAS, etc. to run analyses. With the advent of big data, there has been an exponential increase in the availability of analytical technology platforms. Hence, one needs to have a deep knowledge of statistics and technology in order to develop robust analytical solutions. Also, increasingly technology is being used to implement Marketing Analytics solutions across the enterprise. This is discussed in detail in later sections. Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 13 Marketing Analytics solutions have evolved from the descriptive to the executive Marketing Analytics solutions have evolved in line with underlying business challenges Marketing Analytics solutions have grown steadily over the years, both in terms of the robustness, variety and the complexity of analysis. Before 2000s, the data volume was such that analytical needs were restricted to reporting and summarising data. Players ofered basic solutions such as dashboarding to cater to these needs. In 2000s, data volumes started to grow steadily due to the explosion of web/digital space, and there was a need for solutions to help in prescribing actions. To address this need, Marketing Analytics solutions became increasingly predictive in nature. The later part of the decade saw the emergence of social media and the sheer velocity of data associated with it. This has forced the analytics world to move from predicting to executing real-time. In todays digital world, the customer sentiments go viral instantaneously. CMOs have lesser time to react to such situations. Therefore, there is a need for ability to process data real-time and reduce human intervention in decision making. As a result, many providers have been utilising big data technologies to build real-time-analytics capabilities. Traditional focus has been on B2C industries. Lately there has been some interest in B2B verticals The Business to Consumer (B2C) sector is highly mature in terms of implementing analytics. The Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 14 consumer universe is large and diversied. The demand and purchase patterns of consumers vary vastly depending on their demographics and psychographics. Therefore, there was an immediate need for the B2C sector to understand their customer base in order to grow their top line. The organisations realised this and turned to Marketing Analytics to provide solutions. CPG organisations have been one of the pioneers when it comes to implementation of Marketing Analytics. They leveraged customer segmentation to segment their customer base according to their needs, attitudes and demographics. With a better understanding of their customer base, their marketing campaigns and subsequently RoI were impacted positively. The biggest factor in for the success of analytics in the CPG vertical is the rich and voluminous data available for robust analysis. Due to the limited universe that the Business to Business (B2B) sector caters to, there hasnt been a great volume of data. The sector has always conducted basic analysis like sales force efectiveness and revenue cycle planning. But, with the growth of analytics in the past few years, the sector has identied some oferings which can be of use to them. For instance, B2B sectors have identied pricing as a key area of interest. Analytics providers are now ofering services such as price optimisation and conjoint to the B2B sector. With increasing digital focus there is interest from the B2B sector as well Digital channels have emerged as a major source of brand awareness in the recent past. organisations carry out extensive marketing campaigns online in order to drive awareness of their brands and products. Digital channels enjoy great penetration, with almost one-third of the global population using the internet. With the advent of digital channels, the volume, variety and velocity of data have increased immensely. Digital channels have greatly impacted B2B marketing. Organisations have increasingly leveraged blogs, social networking sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. to put across their messaging. Increased usage of such digital channels is generating enough data required to conduct robust analytics. Key decision makers/inuencers can be identied much more easily through social networks. Hence, there is a new interest in conducting analytics for B2B sector as well. Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 15 Global Analytics Marketplace is still evolving India has a distinct advantage in delivering analytics infrastructure and data management services A robust IT infrastructure and data management capabilities are the foundation of the analytics ecosystem. Global analytics players have invested signicantly in developing them over the years. Indian players have not been too far behind either. IT in India has contributed signicantly to the development of these capabilities. The IT industry led to the creation of trained and experienced IT talent in India. Indian analytics players bought this talent in order to establish their own infrastructure and capabilities. Gradually, as the analytics technologies grew in number and complexity, Indian players have a smooth sailing in adapting to them. Although, these capabilities are in a mature state globally, India has signicant advantages like cost efectiveness and large trained talent pool. Also, these services are commoditized and are and greatly encourage the companies to consider outsourcing. Indian analytics players have used this to their advantage and have emerged as global leaders in analytics service providers. A new trend in the India analytics eld has been emerging. Some of the leading IT/KPO/BPO rms have included analytics services in their portfolio. With a deep knowledge in handling IT infrastructure and data management services, they have a signicant advantage over some of the other players. This Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 16 move will encourage the pure play analytics rms and product rms to vamp up their IT infrastructure and data management capabilities too. This will result in healthy competition which will ultimately benet the Indian analytics landscape. India is leveraging R&D to deliver increasingly sophisticated services and products Traditionally, Indian analytics players have been focused on execution rather than development of solutions. Players have leveraged the established analytics tools and algorithms developed by various global software companies, universities and analytics rms. Indian players have customized the established solutions as per their clienteles requirements. Although this approach is presently working well for players, there is an increased need for players to develop indigenous solutions. As companies worldwide have begun to embrace analytics, there is a greater need to create a more diverse set of analytical solutions. Companies are looking for players ofering cutting edge analytics at an efective cost. Indian players have realized that increased dependence on global rms and university for solutions and software might eat into their value proposition. Therefore, players have begun to invest signicant capital in research and development. Key Trends: Marketing Analytics Increasing in Importance Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 18 Key Trends: Marketing Analytics Increasing in Importance 1 Marketing Analytics is top on the agenda of CXOs 2 CMOs are dealing with increasing complexities in the current environment 3 Marketing Analytics solutions interact with organisation-wide functions 4 Newer digital platforms are increasingly becoming relevant for marketing decisions 5 Marketing Analytics is increasingly being leveraged real-time for execution support 6 India has an advantage to deliver Marketing Analytics services 7 Indian industry has an opportunity to grow to over USD 1.2 billion at 25 per cent CAGR by 2020 8 The Marketing Analytics industry in India is well-balanced, ofering a variety of services Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 19 Marketing Analytics is top on the agenda of CXOs Marketing Analytics engagements are likely to increase in number (more clients) and size (organisation-wide implementation) CXOs have realised that Marketing Analytics is one of the key diferentiators between them and their peers in terms of enabling superior performance. According to an MIT Sloan report, Analytics: The New Path to Value, the organisations that employ the usage of analytics in the widest possible range of decisions were twice more likely to be top performers than their industry peers. There is a steady growth in volume, complexity and variety of data across the levels of the organisation. The CXOs are looking to leverage that to generate insights to help them make informed decisions and build strategies. Therefore, the number of Marketing Analytics engagements is bound to increase in number and size over time. Players need to focus their sales eforts to CXOs, in addition to BU heads Marketing Analytics helps CXOs optimise the current spends and eforts as well as predict future customer trends. Marketing Analytics has the ability to combine historical evidence with current trends in order to predict the future landscape. Hence, Marketing Analytics has become a vital tool in the strategy building arsenal of CXOs. On a tactical level, Marketing Analytics helps in answering questions which Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 20 have an immediate impact on the marketing plans. This attribute of Marketing Analytics is particularly of interest to Business Units Heads who are in charge of devising tactics for their unit. An increased level of awareness regarding the necessity of Marketing Analytics amongst CXOs and BU heads has led to a great demand in its implementation. Players have to build their sales strategies focusing on this customer segment. Solutions are no longer only judged on technical parameters but also on business impact potential Today, personnel who traditionally relied on their experience and gut to make business decisions are looking to leverage Marketing Analytics in their decision making. Their primary concern is to understand the potential scale of impact that analytics has on their business rather than its statistical nitty-gritty. Analytical solutions are not solely judged on their statistical robustness but also on their business impact. Marketing Analytics rms need to make their solutions more intuitive and self-calibrating to convey signicant business impact while maintaining the statistical robustness of the models. Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 21 CMOs are dealing with increasing complexities in the current environment Solutions need to adapt to the new realities of larger volume, velocity and variety of data that are increasingly available in marketing With the advent of myriad channels like internet, mobile and social networking, there has been an explosion in the amount of information that a customer is exposed to in a short period. This has led to two things Firstly, dispersion of audience and secondly, generation of large amount of various data in a very short time frame. This dispersion of audience has forced organisations to try creating a homogenous customer experience across channels. CMOs are nding it dif cult to communicate a unied value proposition across these channels efectively. Additionally, due to the viral nature of customer opinions and sentiments, CMOs realise that they need to act in a time bound manner to convey a positive and unied brand message across channels. This situation creates an opportunity for analytics service providers and consultants to build on this need and develop quick, scalable and accessible solutions which can be implemented by CMOs in their decision making process. Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 22 Players need to develop solutions that are simple to understand and use, to ensure wider adoption within organisations Marketing Analytics has gained an increased prominence in the strategies and tactics building for the organisations. However, one of the major handicaps faced by players is the reservation of business users to embrace analytics. They are concerned about the complexity of the analytical solutions, and their ability to comprehend and implement it. This is a prominent situation in smaller markets where there is little to no usage of analytics. Players need to develop solutions that are intuitive in nature and whose applications can be easily comprehended by the business users. Furthermore, the solutions themselves should be easy to comprehend so that the BU can understand its signicance in their operations. The solutions also need to be scalable across geographies for widespread implementation. Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 23 Marketing Analytics solutions interact with organisation-wide functions Solution scope is now enterprise-wide and that are consistently applicable across business units across regions There is an ever increasing need for departments across organisations to be closer to the consumer and the market realities. Business users of various departments are looking for deeper insights into the customers psyche in order to develop better products, optimise their sales eforts, etc. The word marketing in Marketing Analytics can be a misnomer, as Marketing Analytics solutions can and are applied to functions beyond marketing. Marketing Analytics provide enterprise wide solutions which can be used by other functions like R&D, supply chain management, sales and nance. For instance, in CPG sector, for the category business function, customer demand (which can be estimated by Marketing Analytics) directly afects the number of SKUs that are being produced. Additionally, product portfolio optimisation analysis afects the entire product category and forces the category managers to revamp their SKUs accordingly. Global businesses cannot work in isolation. There is a need for integrated marketing strategies across geographies. To enable this, models need to be built using data from geographically disparate Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 24 locations. For instance, CPG organisations are building models which focus on providing forward looking projections and scenarios across categories, business units and geographies. Analytical best practices derived from the learning are applied across geographies to provide solutions in a timely and cost-efective fashion. Solutions need to be embedded in IT platforms that integrate well with existing client applications Analytics players have a wide palette of software at their disposal. While it can be an advantage as far as variety of analysis is concerned, it poses the problem of having to leverage many disparate IT platforms. Client may have their own existing applications and platforms which have been deployed across the enterprise and which may or may not be compatible with analytical IT platforms. It is up to the analytics provider to determine the best analytics software solution while ensuring that the solution can be integrated seamlessly with the clients existing applications. For enterprise-wide implementation, analytical solutions need to reside within the existing IT infrastructure. Players need to upgrade their implementation skillsets across consulting, large scale project implementation and IT CXOs are looking to incorporate Marketing Analytics into their day-to-day decision making process at an enterprise level. This puts high expectations from the Marketing Analytics players to move beyond just crunching numbers. They need to provide solutions which are highly insightful, streamlined with the IT platforms of the client and can be implemented across the organisation. In markets where analytics is still emerging, marketing managers require a great deal of consultative guidance in understanding the key insights and implementation of analytics into their marketing and sales ecosystem. This has led analytics players to hire onshore staf with a deep understanding of analytics and knowledge of the local market. Insights from Marketing Analytics solutions act as an input to many other functions across the enterprise. A single analytics solution like Market Mix Modelling can potentially generate insights that can be used across various functions like sales, marketing and nance. Players must have a robust infrastructure (manpower and IT tools) in order to implement solution(s) across the enterprise, in various functions efectively. In order to make solutions scalable for future usage, the provider needs to make sure that they can implement the solution on the clients existing IT platforms. Having all these components under one roof will set players apart from each other and give them a competitive edge. Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 25 Newer digital platforms are increasingly becoming relevant for marketing decisions Solutions need to be re-worked ab-initio to ensure optimal results In todays digital age, consumers product choices and perceptions are changing rapidly due to the vast amount of information available via sources like social networking websites, mobile, blogs, customer review websites, etc. The advent of digital channels has caused a distortion in the traditional purchase funnel (awareness, consideration, preference and purchase). While shopping online, a customers awareness may be restricted to brands with high visibility. However, the online retailers websites recommendation engine tends to increase a customers consideration set by suggesting products in their inventory. Some of these products might not have been in the customers consideration set at all. Changes such as these represent a paradigm shift in fundamentals of marketing itself. There is a growing need for organisations to understand the digital channel phenomenon in conjunction with the traditional channels of information like print, TV, retail promotions. Digital data is very diferent from the traditional sources of data like transactional, point of sales data, etc. in type and structure. Hence, adopting a one size ts all approach in modelling might not deliver robust results. Organisations have been experimenting in calculating the RoI of their investment in digital channels. This may be attributed to the fact that players are adapting existing analytical solutions to understand Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 26 digital channels. Existing analytics approaches have been built according to the traditional marketing paradigms. However, as the modern marketing paradigm has been changing, players need to look at new models which incorporate huge volume of unstructured but rich digital data. Hence, players need to re-work on their solutions from scratch. Players need to upgrade their IT and data handling capabilities As the world of analytics is moving towards executive analytics, technology has become a key enabler. The organisations which have used analytics successfully to make data-driven decisions have one thing in common, a robust IT infrastructure. This enables them to capture data in an accurate and timely manner. Analytics players who have combined a good understanding of the traditional IT infrastructure with their data handling capabilities have managed to be extremely successful in implementing robust analytical solutions. However, the advent of digital channels has posed a fresh challenge to the players. Not only do players have to learn how to handle data that is voluminous and fast, but also their back-end IT infrastructure which is largely separate for each channel. Players need to upgrade their skills quickly and learn to leverage digital data sources (and tools) like Radian6, Webtrends, Klout, etc. for analysis and integrate those results with those derived from traditional channels. Players need to be exible in leveraging the various technology platforms as the landscape is still evolving Due to ever increasing and rapidly evolving consumer channels such as web, social and mobile, the demands from clients are changing are ever changing. Many players are still adapting to the myriad platforms brought forth due to these channels. As the number of consumer touchpoints and channels increase rapidly over time, there are going to be many new data sources emerging, subsequently resulting in the introduction of many new technology platforms. Players need to build robust internal systems which will enable them to adapt to various technology platforms quickly and easily. Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 27 Case examples: HP uses e-Commerce analytics solutions, leading to top line growth Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 28 Case examples (contd.): Business impact of delivered analytics quantied Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 29 Marketing Analytics is increasingly being leveraged real-time for execution support Solutions are increasingly expected to be intelligent and actionable at the hands of non-technical end-users Primary users of these solutions are business executives who require insights that are easy to comprehend and can enable quick decision making. As the volume and variety of the data is growing, the analytical procedures employed to deliver solutions are becoming increasingly complex. Solutions need to be developed which are intelligent enough to handle the complexity with minimal human intervention. Additionally, business users who are primarily concerned with the commercial aspect of the business cannot be bothered by statistical complexities of the underlying models. Many Business Intelligence (BI) players have been quick to realise that and have put out BI solutions that enable end-users to manipulate data easily and derive discernible insights and entail quick decisions. Some of the solutions are of-the-shelf products, while some of them have been customised according to client needs. These BI solutions are plug n play in nature and allow business users to derive key insights without needing to know the working of the model. Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 30 Solutions need to be more plug n play and embed well in existing client IT systems Data mining tools, models and simulators need to be portable and platform independent. This saves precious time that would otherwise be used in integrating the solutions to the present IT infrastructure and can instead be utilised in deriving key insights and devising strategies. Large organisations typically tend to make their IT structure uniform throughout their organisations so as to enable speedy deployment of solutions across their organisation. While this is benecial to the client, this poses a problem to the analytical players. They have to ensure that the analytical solution proposed by them is compatible and deployable to their clients IT systems. One instance of versatile solutions is a simple dashboard that links to common data sources. This enables business users to spend lesser time guring out from where to pull/extract data, and focus on how to best manipulate data. Dashboard ensures availability of data in an organised, palatable and easily accessible format. Solutions need to self-correct with minimal human intervention With the velocity of data increasing exponentially, the need for implementation of real-time analytics is increasing more than ever. For organisations like Amazon.com and New York Times, real-time analytics is helping them to increase customer click-throughs on their website by ofering them a personalised usage experience. Timely access of data can help make quicker decisions and subsequently save time and money. Due to the sheer amount and velocity of data, there isnt any time to validate the recommendations of the analytical model of ine and derive insights. Therefore, the models need to be robust enough and self-calibrating so as to generate accurate results with minimal human intervention. e.g. Amazon.com developed their recommendation engine algorithm in over a decade through much iteration and now have a self-calibrating model which can accurately recommend products for cross-sell/up-sell. Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 31 India has an advantage to deliver Marketing Analytics services India is poised to be a global analytics giant With the global demand for analytics steadily increasing, India is quickly gaining a reputation of being the hub for Marketing Analytics. Before the 1990s, organisations had in-house analytics teams which took care of their limited analytics needs. But as the scope and the need for Marketing Analytics grew, there was an increasing need to either grow the analytics team internally or to partner with external experts. Ofshore analytics delivery started in India in 1996, far ahead of other countries, where pure play analytics rms were established at a much later date. Leveraging Indias value proposition of a large, yet cost-efective talent pool, many analytics organisations such as Mu Sigma, Fractal and AbsolutData have been successful in establishing their operations base in India. Over the years, regions of Eastern Europe and China have emerged as competitors to India in providing cost-efective analytical support. However, to quote the CEO of a leading Indian analytics provider, Not a single credible analytics company has risen from China or Eastern Europe. This may be attributed to an insuf ciently trained analytics talent pool in these regions. Although India also faces this problem, what primarily sets the Indian talent pool apart, is its deep roots in technical and math skills, and it willingness to embrace analytics as a viable career option. This Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 32 has enabled analytics players to conduct robust in-house training programmes. Talent is groomed to provide cutting-edge analytics support while streamlining it with the clients business issues. Other major advantages possessed by India are robust IT infrastructure and English speaking skills. India already has a sizeable lead in supplying global analytics talent and needs to build on that advantage if it is to become a global hub for analytics delivery. With the growth of analytics talent in India, players have been able to build a sustainable delivery model. The only drawback in the current Indian analytics landscape is the lack of productisation and developing Intellectual Properties (IPs). However, Indian players have become conscious of these facts and are making earnest eforts to invest and generate more IP. Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 33 Indian industry has an opportunity to grow to over USD 1.2 billion at 25 per cent CAGR by 2020 The current growth rate of the Indian Marketing Analytics industry is poised at a Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 25 per cent and is valued at USD 200 million. Going by these numbers, the Indian Marketing Analytics industry has the potential to grow up to being approximately USD 1.2 billion by 2020. With concentrated eforts by the indigenous players and the government, the industry can aim to achieve higher growth gures. Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 34 The Marketing Analytics industry in India is well-balanced, ofering a variety of services Players difer in their breadth and depth of analytics oferings India is the worlds leading ofshore analytics service provider. The analytics delivery was started in India in 1996. Since then, the analytics industry has grown exponentially in volume and value. India has seen a huge spurt in the number of Marketing Analytics players consisting of pure play analytics rms, IT/BPO services rms, Global in house centres and product rms. Pure play analytics rms specialise in providing analytics services across diferent functions such as marketing, risk, supply chain management to global clients across industries and geographies. The rms have a large pool of specialists across functions and focus on deep domain skills as well. Larger rms with scale and breath of services are able to leverage cross functional knowledge to serve clients better. A variety of IT, BPO and Knowledge Services rms ofer analytics services as a part of their bouquet. These rms are typically large in size and operate across industries and countries. Though IT/research maybe their main oferings, analytics services play an important role in servicing key clients. Recognising the value of cost-efective and scalable operations in India, many global Fortune 500 rms have set up their captive centres in India. These centres focus on providing leverage and scale Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 35 to their internal teams spread across diferent geographies and functions. The activities range from simple reporting to solving complex business issues to innovating ideas to be embraced by their global teams. Lately, there has been an increased interest in the usage of of-the-shelf products. This has led to the genesis of product rms which specialise in ofering niche product oferings in their solution portfolio. Their primary focus is to build products which can solve the various analytical needs of the enterprises with limited customisation. Few of the signicant players are pure play analytics rms Some of the very early players in the analytics outsourcing industry of India were BPO/Knowledge Services rms which started expanding their bouquet of oferings. It emanated from the need that all the solutions need to be outsourced to one vendor instead of multiple vendors. This resulted in lot of operational and cost ef ciencies. The success in delivering analytics led to a number of new pure play analytics rms. However, only a few signicant organisations have emerged amongst the pure play analytics players. Also, from the pure play analytics organisations which emerged, a few got acquired e.g. MarketRx by Cognizant Technology Solutions, Inductis by EXL Services Holdings, etc. Focus of most players is on delivering services rather than products Indian industry has been so successful in pure play services model that it had never felt the need to invest in IP. Majority of the analytics set-ups are geared towards ofering services across domains. But, there is increasing automation, of most of the manual, repetitive analytical tasks done today. Also, clients are asking for ready to deploy solutions. Hence, we are seeing services rms starting to build products. There is a realization that products are more protable and a necessity in the increasingly competitive analytics industry landscape, which is driving the investment in this area. Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 36 CPG vertical Marketing Anlytics solutions entrenched across the value chain As stated earlier, CPG has been one of the pioneers of Marketing Analytics. Listed above are some of the popular analytics models and solutions available to marketers across the various functions within marketing sub-functions. Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 37 Case Examples: AbsolutData develops a novel Consumer Segmentation methodology for a major global brewer Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 38 Case Examples: Genpact implements Trade Promotion Efectiveness for a large food manufacturer Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 39 Retail vertical- late entrant but quick uptake of Marketing Analytics Retail organisations have been leveraging Marketing Analytics quite efectively. They are helped by the fact that they have voluminous and ever growing sales and purchase data within their internal IT systems. Listed above are some of the popular analytics models and solution available for marketers in the retail domain. Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 40 Case example - Marketing Analytics delivering quantiable business impact Here are some of the popular solutions being implemented by analytics players within India. They have delivered quantiable business impact to their clients. Key Challenges for Industry Players Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 42 Key Challenges for Industry Players 1 Players are nding it dif cult to scale up their analytics capabilities due to a global shortage of talent 2 Delivering analytics solutions globally needs a balance in solution consistency across regions while retaining a degree of localization 3 Industry faces a high cost in attrition as analytics is a combination of complex skills that are hard to nd and takes time to build 4 Clients are demanding plugnplay solutions that can be setup faster and are more cost efective 5 Leveraging BIG data requires players to have new skills especially in technology and business integration Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 43 Leveraging a disaggregated approach to talent can help ofset the global shortage of analytical talent Disaggregate the analytics role into three sub-components that are widely available in India business/domain specialists, technical experts and data scientists/engineers When it comes to Marketing Analytics, organisations typically tend to look for the renaissance person who is typically a PhD with over 10 years of experience and has a very holistic understanding of the macro business environment, marketing, and prot & loss issues and the relation between them, as well as deep analytical skills. However, such a prole would not be cost-efective and would not be easy to scale or to ofshore. It is also dif cult to nd the right person for the job at the right place and time. Deep analytical talent shortage is a worldwide trend. According to the Mckinsey report, big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity the shortage of deep analytics talent in US alone would be around 140,000-190,000 by 2018. To overcome this shortage, organisations can explore a simple disaggregation of roles and employ specialised personnel for each of the roles that are required to deliver a successful analytics programme. Analytics delivery requires industry context within engagements. A domain expert, with 5+ years domain experience helps add this context. He/she also helps data scientists to understand data in a better way. The context may be vertical (insurance, CPG, banking) or horizontal (marketing, nance, supply chain) in nature. Obviously, context changes according to the project being delivered. For the Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 44 actual number crunching, the team consists of numerous data scientists and a project manager who along with handling the team also works with the client in communicating insights. Increase the employable talent for analytics by increasing or improving skills in areas like consulting and business/domain understanding India has always been viewed as having abundant and inexpensive talent pool. Over the past 10 years, there has been an increased interest amongst engineers and statisticians to venture into the analytical world which has helped build Indias ofshore operations. Organisations like Mu Sigma, AbsolutData, and Fractal Analytics have used this to their advantage to build up strong analytical capabilities. However, as the business world is embracing analytics, the need of the hour is to have resources who can convert the insights ofered by analytics into meaningful and scalable business answers. Indian analytical rms tend to position cost efectiveness as their primary value proposition but there is a need to change that mindset and graduate to being knowledge experts and trusted business advisors. With the analytics industry growing in India, clients would expect them to develop and nurture analytics talent. Indian players need to invest more in rening skills, and inculcating business skills within talent. Only strong business or domain along with relationship building skills will help in Indian analytical organisations graduating to trusted advisors of client businesses. One way to do that is to deploy resources onshore on a rotational basis in order to expose them to the local details of the business. Opportunity to get a larger share of the global pie by setting up centres in various geographies Indian organisations have the opportunity to tap into global talent pool by setting up delivery centres across the world especially in nearshore locations. The opportunity becomes even more signicant given the global shortage of analytics talent. Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 45 Optimal onshore-ofshore talent mix will enable an efective global delivery model Players need to build a well-coordinated global delivery model with a mix of onsite talent (for solution localisation) and ofshore talent (for solution consistency) Currently, a lot of analytical players dont have an optimal onshore, ofshore resource balance. While some players operate purely out of India, some have a larger presence onshore who provide support throughout the duration of the project. Organisations need to reach an optimal ratio we believe to be 15-20 per cent onshore strength. As mentioned before, onshore resource is typically a domain expert with vast experience and usually comes at a higher price. In a project lifecycle, an onshore resource is primarily active in the initial and nal stages of the project donning the hat of an analytics and domain expert. In the initial stage, the primary role is to understand the business questions and deciding what type of analytics is most suited to derive a solution. Whereas in the nal stage, the role graduates to that of a domain expert helping the CMOs in understanding and implementing the results in their marketing practice. In the middle stage of the project, the onshore resource is dormant, as most of that stage involves data analysis which can be done by the ofshore resources. Having an onshore resource for 100 per cent of the time in a project can be very expensive, while having a completely of-shore team may make CMOs a bit uncomfortable. Therefore, it is extremely essential to nd a ne balance between onshore and ofshore resources. Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 46 Players should invest in building onsite/nearshore delivery centres to house talent sourced locally This problem can be seen as a two-fold problem 1) For an analytics rm, with its primary delivery centre at an ofshore location, where should they locate their onshore of ces; 2) How to make sure that the ofshore team is able to cater to the needs of the clients in a timely manner. Some 20 years ago, 90 per cent of the analytics needs used to emanate from the US, but now less than 50 per cent needs are from the US and majority of it is from the rest of the world. Since majority of the markets outside of US are still nascent in the implementation of analytics, it makes it prudent to have local presence wherever possible. The analytics players are faced with a conundrum regarding the placement of their onshore delivery of ce(s) around the globe. A very simple solution to this is to divide project types into two short-term projects, low ticket size client for whom onshore deputation would work (ofshore resources sent onsite for a short duration) and long-term projects, large ticket size client for whom local support is provided by hiring or ofshore resoures with long-term visa. Time diference is an extremely vital factor in speedy expedition of work as most of the work can be done overnight (from POV of a client). The only drawback of this model being that should the client have any query regarding a solution, support is seldom available. Players have worked around this drawback by implementing the shift system which has their employees to have rotational shifts during the day or the night time. By having both day and night shift employees on a project, the client is presented with an advantage of speedy delivery as well as day time support. Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 47 Organisations need to be proactive with their training and engagement programmes to keep the highly costly attrition under control Players need to invest in employee engagement beyond rewards and focus on meeting individuals aspiration on accelerated career development/progression Attrition is a huge problem for analytics players mainly due to two reasons Firstly, attrition is a huge monetary loss for an organisation (costs incurred to hire and train fresh employee) and secondly, loss of an employee who might be very well aligned with the organisations needs and growth plans. Today, an employees needs have evolved far beyond monetary compensation and recognition within the organisation. Players have to realise that and come up with employee engagement levers beyond tangible rewards and recognition. Organisations could: Chart out a career path for the employees: Having a denite idea of ones career path in the organisation helps one set long-term personal goals aligned with those of the organisations Expose to diferent streams of work: Internal job postings can go a long way in ensuring that an employee retains interest in his/her line of work. Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 48 Players need to reduce the time and cost of onboarding by setting up learning academies (similar to what IT players have done) Data analysts in India are primarily hired from engineering colleges and business schools. However, the present curriculum provides very little analytics exposure. Its left up to the analytics rms to train the campus hires through a mix of extensive classroom and on-the-job trainings. A direct result of this is an extremely lengthy onboarding period (lasting for typically 6-8 months) wherein a fresher is exposed to the entire gamut of analytics software, techniques and their applications. A typical training programme consists of some classroom sessions wherein freshers are taught the basics of tools, techniques and their application in various analytical domains like CRM, marketing efectiveness, etc. In parallel, they are stafed on live client projects and are expected to apply their learning from the classroom sessions. The biggest aw of this approach is that the fresher is burdened to start performing from Day 1 on the job with whatever rudimentary skills they have acquired. This results in inaccuracy and slow execution of their work and eventually frustration and attrition. Organisations spend a lot of money on training, and attrition results in signicant monetary loss for them. Indian analytics players have to realise that training and retaining talent is a much better option than buying talent due to two reasons Firstly, there is a great dearth of trained and experienced analytical talent, and secondly, hiring and training a fresher is relatively cheaper than buying an experienced person who can perform the same tasks. Analytics players can look towards their IT counterparts like TCS and Infosys when it comes to devising and implementing structured training programmes. The rst 2-3 months of their tenure consists of rigorous classroom training wherein a fresher is exposed to all the aspects of IT infrastructure, programming language and implementation. Practical exercises are conducted by giving group projects wherein the freshers can apply their learning. Regular evaluations are conducted and nally employees who pass the training successfully are inducted into the organisation. This results in: Induction of employees most suited for that job Fresh recruits are productive from Day 1 Increased engagement of the employees with the organisation Less attrition Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 49 Developing plug and play solutions will require investments in IP and knowledge management Players need to build productised solutions, specic to industry verticals that are proven and can be congured easily In the present scenario, where a wide variety of analytics solutions are available, the CXOs decide whether they want to execute a solution depending on its priority and their timing and budget. Analytical players have to be conscious of this and endeavour to reduce timelines and cost as much as possible. Instead of building customised solutions from scratch each time, the need of the hour is to create analytics products which are scalable and can be used across clients by conguring it according to their specic needs. When exercised efectively, the use of products to personalise future solutions allows distribution of efort costs across multiple clients, enabling each client to utilise analytics in their business problems at a lower cost. Lessons learnt in the deployment of each solution will accrue positively in the knowledge centre and consequent solutions can avoid previously recognised errors while exploiting efective techniques rectied in previous solutions. Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 50 For analytics players, creating products leads to higher productivity of their organisation. Firstly, creating products compensates the need for highly qualied and experienced talent who can build services from the scratch (which is pretty scarce today). Secondly, it allows them to use their time and resources to expand their portfolio oferings. Lastly, in the long run, it results in a lot of internal ef ciencies which can be passed onto the client in the form of cost benet. Indian players need to build contextual solutions (verticalisation) or cross-leverage learnings across industries In the present scenario, Indian analytics players are solution-oriented and rely on a one size ts all approach. But as the diversity across and within verticals are increasing, this approach might not be very fruitful in every scenario. Indian players need to focus their attention to build solutions which are vertical-specic. Focusing eforts on vertical solution allows the analytics player to develop sturdy and all-encompassing analytics product which can be re-used on demand, reducing the time to adapt and update each solution. This accelerates the learning curve for vertical-specic solutions and allows the players to expedite building of concrete solutions with ease. When tailoring vertical-specic solutions, we should endeavour to include and apply maximum relevant facts, insights and acumen in such solutions so that the resulting product is exhaustive and robust, delivering optimal value to the client. In turn, the players can implement the best practices and learning across verticals to develop robust solutions. Players can increase solution t by co-creating solutions with clients as well as by incorporating the learning/best practices from their various other experiences As the awareness of the implementation of analytics is spreading within the factions of the organisation, clients are more receptive to working with the analytics players to develop tools and solutions which are customised for their organisations. Players should realise that this presents them with a golden opportunity to utilise clients existing knowledge banks when developing complex analytics models or solutions as they will have the data and insights collected over a long uninterrupted period as opposed to the controlled and ltered data collected by individual analytics teams. This collaboration can have a number of advantages for the player: Help the players to have a steeper learning curve of the organisation and industry: Players can use the knowledge to develop independent solutions for other clients in the same industry. Client-specic context is built into the solution: This provides greater visibility and subsequently more condence to the client with respect to the solution. Better disaggregation of roles, minimal duplication of skillsets: In this scenario, the Service Line Agreements (SLAs) will be very clearly dened between the client and the service provider which in turn will facilitate the disaggregation of roles. Referring to the resourcing model suggested earlier, the service providers team will only consist of project manager and data scientist(s) whereas the client will be the domain expert. This will in turn also lead to cost efectiveness. Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 51 Leveraging big data requires players to have new skills especially in technology and its integration with business Players need to be exible to adapt to the various big data technologies while the industry continues to evolve Big data has revolutionised the way organisations look at their customers. It helps get a granular view of data and goes a long way in marketing to the individual customer through personalisation of analytics. Big data technology landscape has been evolving at a rapid space. Players in Marketing Analytics need to adapt to this evolution. For example, Neiman Marcus, a high-end retailer, has developed both behavioural segmentation and a multi-tier membership rewards programme, and this combination has led to substantially more purchases of higher margin products from its most af uent, higher-margin customers. Similarly, in addition to using traditional market-research data and data on historical purchases, retailers now track and leverage data on the behaviour of individual customers including clickstream data from the web. Retailers can now update this increasingly granular data in near real-time to adjust to customer changes. Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 52 Players need to invest up-front in building new frameworks/solutions to incorporate big data into the current traditional solutions Big data needs investments from analytics players to adapt their existing solutions to leverage big data technologies. Organisations have leveraged big data into their existing solutions and have seen tremendous returns. For example Williams-Sonoma, has integrated customer databases with information on some 60 million households, tracking such things as their income, housing values, and number of children. Targeted e-mails based on this information obtain 10 to 18 times the response rate of emails that are not targeted, and the organisation is able to create diferent versions of its catalogues attuned to the behaviour and preferences of diferent groups of customers. Similarly, retailers are using big data to integrate promotions and pricing for shoppers seamlessly, whether those consumers are online, in-store, or perusing a catalogue. Way Forward Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 54 1 Analytics way forward is customisable, self-learning, and end-to-end 2 The government can help the industry to further consolidate its frontrunner positioning in the global analytics market 3 The industry can further help itself by coming together and jointly addressing some of the key challenges it faces Way Forward Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 55 Analytics way forward - Customisable, Self learing, End to End Due to the need for personalisation of analytics newer proles in analytics will emerge In the recent time, the consumer landscape has changed greatly. Consumers mindset has deviated from the what are others buying to what is good for me. Organisations have realised this evolution and now have started to target each consumer individually. Organisations like Amazon are ofering product recommendations based on past customer purchases. This has put major pressure on analytics players to develop solutions which enable marketers to cater to the individual customer. The current talent pool which mainly consists of mathematicians/statisticians, have little insight into the consumer mindset required to personalise analytics or the exibility in adapting to the dynamic IT infrastructure. In addition to other skills like domain and consulting knowledge, players would also need additional skills, primarily consisting of: Computer Science Post Graduates: With the growing need to build self-learning and calibrating analytical models, players would need to leverage machine learning algorithms and big data algorithms. This is creating a need to hire computer science post graduates, with a data mining background to develop robust algorithms Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 56 Psychology Post Graduates: With the focus of organisations shifting towards individuals rather than groups, they have realised that an individuals decision making process is deeper than perceived. Individuals tend to be inuenced by their friend circle, opinions on websites, emotional perception towards a brand, etc. which are not successfully captured by the traditional models. Hence, the organisations are required to hire psychologists to understand the in-depth behaviour of individuals and incorporate them into analytical models. Robust advanced analytical techniques from computer sciences will increasingly be adopted Today, there is an exponential increase in the amount and velocity of data and the need to harness this data to generate insights is paramount. In this dynamic data environment, traditional analytical techniques may fall short in generating insights in real-time and with accuracy. With the evolution of big data technological platforms like Hadoop and Map Reduce, there has been a signicant increase in the processing power which has enabled players to control the data and generate actionable insights. These technological platforms have also ensured that one can now utilise complex and extensive algorithms of computer sciences to run statistical analysis and develop analytical solutions. Such solutions nd their roots in disciplines within computer science such as advanced algorithm design and analysis, system architecture and data warehousing and mining. Industry consolidation will lead to competitive environment The present marketing analytics domain is extremely complex and fragmented. Players are required to ofer a variety of services across the marketing efectiveness, customer relationship management and market research domains, some more complex than others. Due to this, there are a large number of players who ofer specialised but limited services. This is a major cause of frustration for CMOs as they end up working with a lot of service providers. The call of the hour is to consolidate analytical services and products under one roof and ofer one-stop-shop to the clients. IBM has been reasonably successful in this regard with the acquisition of multiple organisations like Cognos, SPSS, etc. Not only have they expanded their analytics oferings, but have also leveraged their vast knowledge and experience of dealing with IT infrastructure and integrated it with analytics, broadening their landscape in the process. Players who are able to consolidate their services would have the opportunity to grab a larger share of the pie as organisations would tend to outsource their analytics to a single provider. This would eventually lead to a highly competitive environment amongst similar sized organisations. Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 57 The government can help the industry to further consolidate its frontrunner positioning in the global analytics market Analytics can be the next big revenue stream for government after IT India is being recognised globally as a frontrunner in providing analytical support. With various benets such as large talent pool and cost efectiveness, India has the potential to become a world leader in analytics support. Given the tremendous growth opportunities within analytics, it can become the next big revenue stream for the government like IT. Once investors recognise the potential of the industry in terms of business competency in the country, they might seek opportunities to invest in this growing industry in the form of FDIs or by funding individual ventures. Either path will generate revenue for the government through taxes, job creation and industry enrichment. Government needs to be proactive in supporting analytics in the same way it did for IT The growth of the IT sector is one of the shining examples of Indias phenomenal growth in the recent times. Due credit should be given to the Indian Government which abated in the phenomenal growth by introducing pro industry laws and ofering nancial support to the start-ups. Same way as IT, analytics is poised to be the next big growth sector in the market. In order to facilitate the rapid growth of the analytics industry, the government must recognise areas where it can help the industry and provide Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 58 the same level of support as it did to the IT industry. Financial assistance in the form of soft loans and MAT exemptions can greatly facilitate small analytics players to secure IP rights and develop services to ourish in a competitive landscape. This assistance will pay future dividends to the government once such small business owners become the backbone of the economy in driving employment opportunities, delivering unique competencies to Fortune 500 organisations globally and creating a distinct identity for the country in terms of its global business rankings. In addition to scal aid, analytics as an industry can benet from the government taking an active interest in promoting the subject in educational institutions and encouraging its incorporation into the curriculum in technology courses as well as management programmes. Training and honing the right talent during the industrys nascent phase is of paramount importance in jump starting the industrys growth in the country. One of the major concerns of clients while deciding to outsource their analytics projects are overseas data protection. Although, players have incorporated robust data warehouses which follow the strictest of security measures, it may not be enough to assure the client regarding the data security. Government can help play a helping hand by legislating and implementing stronger data protection and piracy laws with an iron hand. Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 59 The industry can further help itself by coming together and jointly addressing some of the key challenges it faces Industry needs to make sizeable investments in training of talent The explosive growth that the analytics sector is facing is hampered by a pronounced lack in availability of trained talent. This needs to be addressed in a most urgent manner by the industry players themselves. Players need to develop better in-house training programmes that are good enough to onboard campus hires efectively and quickly. While this is a sustainable solution for medium to large-sized organisations, small organisations exhibit a need for readymade talent. Players can also think of helping establish external training organisations on the lines of NIIT in IT sector, which can address industry analytics training needs directly and create a liaison between the rms requirements and their training programmes. Increasing productisation will enable services-oriented set-up to compete globally While productisation seems to be a natural commercial evolution for any analytics rm, developing industry-specic solutions and deploying products across global clientele is no longer an option, but a competitive necessity. Development of distinctive Intellectual Property (IP) is still in a nascent stage in India and may hurt its chances against the global players who already have distinctive IP for their services. Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 60 An option that Indian players have is, to individually and/or jointly pool resources with academic institution and develop intellectual property for the industry. Players can hire interns from the institutions and engage them in creating services which serve as a unique value proposition to the global clientele. Build a stronger analytics brand within India itself While the global giants have moved on to a mature state of implementing analytics and taking data-driven decisions, Indian organisations still rely on rudimentary market research to generate market insights on an aggregate level. With the consumer behaving more independently than before, Indian organisations might sufer due to their global marketing approach. This can be majorly attributed to two things rstly, a lack of awareness as to how benecial the analytics ecosystem can be to their business and secondly, lack of budget within organisations to set up robust IT and analytics infrastructure. Analytics players in India should step up to the plate and try to spread awareness amongst organisations on the innite benets ofered by analytics. This can be done by conducting global seminars, writing industry reports (such as this one), developing IPs and patents in conjunction with the client, etc. Players should do this not only to further their own business but also to help the organisations realise their true potential on the global platform by the usage of analytics. Company Proles: Solution and Service Providers Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 62 Annik Technology Services Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 63 Blue Star Infotech Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 64 Concentrix Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 65 CRISIL Global Research Analytics Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 66 Cross-Tab Marketing Services Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 67 CSS Corp Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 68 Deance Technologies Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 69 EXL Service Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 70 Leptonmaps Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 71 Marketelligent Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 72 Mindtree Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 73 Novartis Healthcare Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 74 Rocsearch Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 75 Sapient Nitro Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 76 SAS India Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 77 Sutherland Global Services Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 78 Suyati Technologies Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 79 The Smart Cube Case Studies Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 82 CRISIL GR&A- Transformational Impact created for a global telecom player Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 83 CrossTab: Business transformation for a Fortune 50 Global IT Company Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 84 Datamatics Global : Telecom Infrastructure Analytics Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 85 EXL: Marketing Analytics Support for a Leading Health Payer Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 86 RocSearch CPG/Retail Analytics Oferings and their Impact Marketing Analytics: An Opportunity for India to Lead 87 Glossary CAGR Compounded Annual Growth Rate. USD United States Dollar BN Billion MN Million R&D Research & Development IT Information Technology ETL Extraction, Transformation and Loading CRM Customer Relationship Management BPO Business Process Outsourcing KPO Knowledge Process Outsourcing NA North America EU European Union SKU Stock-keeping unit CPG Consumer Packaged Goods MAT Minimum Alternative Tax IP Intellectual Property PG Post Graduate POV Point of View International Youth Centre Teen Murti Marg, Chanakyapuri New Delhi 110 021, India T 91 11 2301 0199 F 91 11 2301 5452 research@nasscom.in www.nasscom.in