Winning with Big Data

In today’s highly competitive and dynamic business landscape, the marketing strategy is considered a key differentiator.

From banks, telecommunications, retail to the public sector, senior management in organizations are realizing how marketing can truly enable business growth. Locally, the time is now for marketers to seize the vast opportunities while the Philippine economy is very bullish.

The way we do marketing is changing mainly because of Big Data.  The basic use of data to understand how marketing campaigns affect demand is old news.  Today, marketing focus is on the customer.  This shift is causing marketers to become good at data and data integration—churning out actionable insights that contribute significantly to the bottom line.

Currently, most organizations in the Philippines are challenged by the explosion of information being fueled by double-digit growth in Big Data, mobile, cloud and social technologies. The challenge is to gain value from the massive amounts of data they have. Big Data is more than a matter of size; it is a way to uncover insights and opportunities from new and emerging internal and external sources of data and content from within your own organization to your customers, business partners, and suppliers.

Transactions, multichannel interactions, social media, syndicated data through sources like loyalty cards, and other customer-related information have increased the ability of marketers to create a complete picture of customers’ preferences, demands and new ways to engage with existing and potential customers. This principle clearly applies in retail, but equally as well in banking and finance, telecommunications, healthcare, government, and consumer products where end-customers and citizens are involved, and in business-to-business interactions among business partners and suppliers.

One of the massive challenges identified in IBM’s Chief Market Officer (CMO) Study is that marketers need to forge unique connections with customers, depending on each customer’s preferences and needs. Marketers need to apply a smarter approach to commerce using analytics to better manage their value chain—including buy, market, sell, and service processes— through a customer-centered approach, increasing revenue and loyalty.

Likewise, data has always sat in the center of a finance executive’s job responsibilities, and now Big Data insights are growing increasingly important. The head of finance have long relied on historic data to determine how to allocate budgets. But today, the finance executive must also provide insights and analysis to anticipate the future to enable more strategic decision making much like marketers in their management and execution of marketing campaigns.

The best part about Big Data is that it opens a business up to new possibilities. This would certainly help with the decision making when the CMO, CFO, CIO, CEO and other C-suite leaders come together to transform the organization. The head of finance and other senior decision makers in the organization can now ask and get answers to an array of new business questions.

Gathering the data is no longer the challenge. The opportunity is around uncovering new and unique ways via analytics to use the data to solve pressing customer and business challenges that both marketing and finance leaders face.

Similarly, the human resource department can transform the organization using Big Data, into a smarter workforce and gain real-time view into thousands of data points shared by employees via corporate surveys, commonly available employee data as well as data shared on internal and external social media platforms. Marketers can use the same data to engage with its internal customers, who are often neglected in most organizations. After all, loyal and satisfied employees are the best marketers and brand ambassadors.

Organizations can also tap into the pulse of their workforce to improve retention, performance and morale. They can also use analytics to understand what drives job performance, or how employees feel about a new company policy or advertising campaign.

With the help of prevailing technologies like Big Data, Mobile, Social Business and Cloud, marketing together with finance, human resource, and IT under the CEO’s strategic guidance have the capabilities within their grasps to transform their organizations and achieve key performance index by simply improving internal and external customer experience.

More importantly, in this era of cognitive, leveraging Big Data is essential to win in the marketplace. (The author is the Country Manager for Marketing of IBM Philippines).