More than four decades ago, I started my career in sales, peddling bicycles. At that time, the MNC which I joined straight out of B-school had a warehouse on the outskirts of Pune, which took care of all despatches to the states of Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. One point which always amazed us was the almost perfect knowledge of our stocks which our then biggest dealer in Pune seemed to have. This was a bit surprising because the warehouse was a good fifteen kilometres away from the city and phone connections in the mid-seventies were quite dodgy. With a little discreet digging we found out the source - one of the clerks at the warehouse had been suborned! We took care of this alright but this was more or less what intelligence about competitors and the market was about then. A passing glance at a truck offloading stocks of our major competitor for instance gave us enough inputs to fine-tune our tactics for the immediate future.
Intelligence was almost totally collected by people and experience enabled one to collect, collate and interpret. Some of us used to jot such information down - for instance, in that company, the reputation of the loose-leaf black book which our then All India Sales Manager, Mr Nair used to maintain was legendary! As part of our training, we were exhorted to observe and take note of anything which could affect us and the company. Many dealers used to hang frames of the bicycles they stocked on a wooden rod hanging from the ceiling. A glance at that when entering the showroom would give clues not only on how much stocks the dealer had but even a good idea of the stocks he had of the company's brand and those of its competitors' brands. In turn, this would help the salesperson to decide the size of the order for which he could make a pitch.
The personal touch extended to absorbing as much relevant information about the people at the dealerships too - the equations within their families, births, marriages, illnesses and deaths, which dealer's son had applied for higher education, what other businesses they had and so on. An interesting sidelight was that one of our dealers in a major city was purportedly in the business of money lending to the denizens of the nearby red light area! Again, all of this was collected either in person or handed down by colleagues and bosses and from any encounters one had with the salespersons of competitors.
While all of this is and was very important, it was a slow process and also had huge elements of subjectivity. The rapid spread of the Internet and IT over the last two decades has reduced the importance of such information. Today, such information is not the primary input - it is just one of the entire mix of elements constituting Market Intelligence. Technology today enables much quicker capture of information, especially on consumer behaviour and the speed with which this is processed by analytical tools and Artificial Intelligence is impressive, if not scary. Let me give a few recent personal examples to drive home this point.
The other day, at home we were contemplating the purchase of a smaller bag for an impending journey. We visited the site of one of the biggest online marketers and even zeroed in on what we thought we would buy. About ten minutes later, I visited the site of Cricinfo to find out what was happening in the world of cricket. I was pretty gobsmacked to see an ad for a travelling bag on the page I opened - the exact brand we had thought of buying, in the same size and in even the colour we had shortlisted.
When we are looking for hotel deals for any impending trips, once I have visited the sites of such aggregators, by now, I am used to see my Facebook news feed replete with information on such deals for the hotels I surfed - learning which comes out here is to read the fine print always. What seemed a steal recently when I investigated further turned out to be for a room with lesser facilities than what I wanted!
There is a temple near my house where we go regularly. In fact a few days back, I had posted on Facebook some photographs of the decorations there for a recent festival. Today my FB news feed carries an announcement of a series of discourses to be held there next week - the interesting part is that the announcement for these lectures has still not been put up at the temple! Thankfully, the AI tool which made this connection between my FB post on the temple and these discourses doesn't know yet that I hardly ever attend such lectures.
For the marketer, reliance on these tools is a huge help as it helps in determination of better prospects quickly, which would aid more selective targeting. However, as a customer, I view this development with trepidation and even dismay. At what stage does legitimate collection of customer information morph into an intrusion into privacy? There is this well-documented case about five years ago of the US retail chain Target gleaning information about their customers who were likely to be pregnant and devising specific offers for them. Do follow this link for more on this.aspect. : https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html
To summarise, technology has enabled almost instantaneous capture of information on consumer behaviour and starting from this, made more effective targeting and therefore more efficient marketing possible. However, when I take off the hat of a practitioner and educator in the field of Marketing and look at this issue as a layman, I am uncomfortable with what technology knows about me. I am equally concerned about who can have access to such information.
Yes, a line has to be drawn between the need for more and more customer information on an organisation's part on one hand and the customer's inalienable right to privacy, on the other. Who draws the guideline - Government, legislation, Courts, industry itself, consumer resistance - is not clear at the moment, leave alone what the guideline itself is. Hopefully, as this is an evolving process, more clarity will be needed and will emerge in due course.
Intelligence was almost totally collected by people and experience enabled one to collect, collate and interpret. Some of us used to jot such information down - for instance, in that company, the reputation of the loose-leaf black book which our then All India Sales Manager, Mr Nair used to maintain was legendary! As part of our training, we were exhorted to observe and take note of anything which could affect us and the company. Many dealers used to hang frames of the bicycles they stocked on a wooden rod hanging from the ceiling. A glance at that when entering the showroom would give clues not only on how much stocks the dealer had but even a good idea of the stocks he had of the company's brand and those of its competitors' brands. In turn, this would help the salesperson to decide the size of the order for which he could make a pitch.
The personal touch extended to absorbing as much relevant information about the people at the dealerships too - the equations within their families, births, marriages, illnesses and deaths, which dealer's son had applied for higher education, what other businesses they had and so on. An interesting sidelight was that one of our dealers in a major city was purportedly in the business of money lending to the denizens of the nearby red light area! Again, all of this was collected either in person or handed down by colleagues and bosses and from any encounters one had with the salespersons of competitors.
While all of this is and was very important, it was a slow process and also had huge elements of subjectivity. The rapid spread of the Internet and IT over the last two decades has reduced the importance of such information. Today, such information is not the primary input - it is just one of the entire mix of elements constituting Market Intelligence. Technology today enables much quicker capture of information, especially on consumer behaviour and the speed with which this is processed by analytical tools and Artificial Intelligence is impressive, if not scary. Let me give a few recent personal examples to drive home this point.
The other day, at home we were contemplating the purchase of a smaller bag for an impending journey. We visited the site of one of the biggest online marketers and even zeroed in on what we thought we would buy. About ten minutes later, I visited the site of Cricinfo to find out what was happening in the world of cricket. I was pretty gobsmacked to see an ad for a travelling bag on the page I opened - the exact brand we had thought of buying, in the same size and in even the colour we had shortlisted.
When we are looking for hotel deals for any impending trips, once I have visited the sites of such aggregators, by now, I am used to see my Facebook news feed replete with information on such deals for the hotels I surfed - learning which comes out here is to read the fine print always. What seemed a steal recently when I investigated further turned out to be for a room with lesser facilities than what I wanted!
There is a temple near my house where we go regularly. In fact a few days back, I had posted on Facebook some photographs of the decorations there for a recent festival. Today my FB news feed carries an announcement of a series of discourses to be held there next week - the interesting part is that the announcement for these lectures has still not been put up at the temple! Thankfully, the AI tool which made this connection between my FB post on the temple and these discourses doesn't know yet that I hardly ever attend such lectures.
For the marketer, reliance on these tools is a huge help as it helps in determination of better prospects quickly, which would aid more selective targeting. However, as a customer, I view this development with trepidation and even dismay. At what stage does legitimate collection of customer information morph into an intrusion into privacy? There is this well-documented case about five years ago of the US retail chain Target gleaning information about their customers who were likely to be pregnant and devising specific offers for them. Do follow this link for more on this.aspect. : https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html
To summarise, technology has enabled almost instantaneous capture of information on consumer behaviour and starting from this, made more effective targeting and therefore more efficient marketing possible. However, when I take off the hat of a practitioner and educator in the field of Marketing and look at this issue as a layman, I am uncomfortable with what technology knows about me. I am equally concerned about who can have access to such information.
Yes, a line has to be drawn between the need for more and more customer information on an organisation's part on one hand and the customer's inalienable right to privacy, on the other. Who draws the guideline - Government, legislation, Courts, industry itself, consumer resistance - is not clear at the moment, leave alone what the guideline itself is. Hopefully, as this is an evolving process, more clarity will be needed and will emerge in due course.
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