Marketing & Strategy Articles

Today in the world, it is increasingly becoming difficult to enhance sustainable growth of the firm due to extensive global competition. In the battle for new talent, HR divisions have been compelled to extend their nomenclature from hiring and firing, directing personnel frameworks and procedures, employee training and development to adopting strategies to grow employer awareness, to build the employer brand as a “great place to work,” and to retain top talent. With technology presenting new solutions to organizations, HR departments have also started using cutting edge technology tools in the market. These best of breed tools help in cutting competition but the ultimate challenge remains to identify market opportunity, grab that and generate measurable results.

In 2014, Valve corporation, a name synonymous with the world of gaming, released a documentary film ‘Free to Play’. The film focused on the lives of three professional players before and after they participated in ‘The International (2011)’, an eSports tournament of their newly launched game ‘Defense of the Ancients’ popularly known as DOTA 2. The documentary was well received and highly praised by the critics. The reason why the documentary did exceptionally well was that it introduced people with the gaming segment of multiplayer online battle arena(MOBA).

With the rapid growth of internet around the world especially in India had created a larger set of opportunities for the businesses that use digital as their platforms. Combining with Big Data no one have ever imagined that they are going to change entire consumer experience in the coming days. But the fact is they have already started. In this article now let us briefly see what all are the major contributions of digitalization, Analytics and Bigdata in enhancing the consumer experience and facilitating the ease of doing business for SMEs. Since they are coming with a new idea that could solve an existing problem and they don’t have huge marketing budgets they can reply up on digital marketing techniques to gain popularity and revenues. So, let us see now how can the strategy be made for these firms using the available digital tools and internet.

When was the last time you were watching something on the television? You had your undivided attention to it? You were that much engaged in the content you did not even changed the channel. If you were able to think of such a time was it anything related to sports, is there anything other than sports that was able to entice you to the screen? If one thinks about how many option a viewer has to choose from its practically unlimited if you add internet to this already cluttered media space. Just to think of there are a total of 832 TV channels alone in India and the total of the world goes more than 4000. Doesn’t it become challenging just to stick to somethings for long period of time.

One of my favourite lines from the film The Spiderman is when Uncle Ben gives his words of wisdom to Peter Parker ‘With great power comes great responsibility’. If that movie were to be remade today, I wonder how Uncle Ben would have advised Parker- ‘With Big Data comes big responsibility’.

It has been quite some time that I have been hearing the façade with big data and data-driven marketing until one fine afternoon, I witnessed it first-hand when my friend and I sat down to make a marketing model for a business venture. We divided our marketing model into sections like Achievable Marketing Goals, SWOT Analysis, Buyer Personas, A/B Testing, and Measurable Key Metrics and both of us somewhere knew that in coming days, we will have to leverage the power of data-  Customer Data, Competitor Data, Internal Data, and External data and only then we will be reaching somewhere close to a heightened customer engagement.

For any business to grow it is very important to understand the difference between a customer and a consumer. In most cases, the customer is the consumer but there are several cases where there is a remarkable difference between the two. And this becomes very important for businesses to understand. Understanding the key differences between a customer and a consumer can help companies have better strategies, better communication, streamlined marketing activities etc.