Date:21/04/2005 URL: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/bline/catalyst/2005/04/21/stories/2005042100230300.htm

Back Making sense of numbers

Sriram Srinivasan

Information which can lead to insights

BREAD and jam, beer and diapers, premium shirts and girls' toys. The first two items seem the most probable combination but the others too have proven compatibility. Beer and diapers, in an example that is now famous in marketing circles, have found a place in the shopping lists of many young fathers in the US who have had to baby-sit.

So, what makes buyers of premium shirts purchase girls' toys? Guilt! "Affluent fathers buy stuff for their daughters, as they feel guilty about pampering themselves with expensive shirts," says S. Ramakrishnan, co-founder and CEO of marketing analytics company Marketics, which worked this out for its client — an Indian retailer.

The `market basket analysis,' as the study is known, is just one of the many services that Marketics offers, primarily to US-based multinationals.

Its team of about 100 marketing domain experts and statistical analysts collects millions of bits of data from clients, sifts through them, makes sense of associations and finally suggests marketing plans.

The shirt-toy combination, for instance, was worked out after sorting out volumes of bills collected over three years.

"Generally, companies don't have the time and resources to analyse their own data," says Ramakrishnan, who reckons that each bit of data, often ignored, carries clues to a larger trend.

Apart from regular number crunching, for which it gets a fixed fee, Marketics takes up specific assignments, one of which helped a company find the "best location" for its shop. Marketics built a store locator model based on "key drivers for a store's success" and past data.

Its Web site makes a mention of the work it did for a non-alcoholic beverage major: a model that explains the relationship between media inputs and the resulting product awareness.

Marketics was co-founded by S. Ramakrishnan, Shankar Maruwada and Vinay Mishra, who sensed an opportunity in finding insights from data and then suggesting an action plan based on the insights.

The company is in the process of setting up a London office (after two in the US). Ramakrishnan says he has won over US companies (whom he refuses to refer to by name) not on the basis of cost. "Ours is not necessarily a cheaper model, but a knowledge model."

The company, as a policy, doesn't work with its clients' competitors. "The nature of data that we get is very strategic, and sometimes very explosive. And with such a stance, we are in a position to build the relationship," he says.

Although Marketics does work for Indian companies from time-to-time, its focus is likely to be predominantly on the West. That's because the quantum of work is much more there and data sources are relatively more authentic.