'Every conversation begins and ends with data for a marketer'

Modern marketing runs on data. Most of us must have at some point or the other come across the saying ‘data is the new oil’. A panel of experts decoded the fundamentals of data strategy at TechManch 2023.

Along with the session chair Santhosh Srikant, Director and General Manager, Acoustic India, panellists Animesh Kishore, Head COE Digital & Analytics, ITC Limited; Ravi Vijayaraghavan, Chief Data & Analytics Officer, Flipkart Group and Nagaraj Krishnamurthy, Chief Analytics Officer, Madison World explored why marketing needs to be data-driven to be effective and how it allows brands to evaluate the effectiveness of their marketing to enhance customer experience for greater ROI.

“For a marketeer, every conversation begins and ends with data,” Srikant pointed out as he kickstarted the conversation.

Highlighting the importance of a robust data strategy, Kishore shared that ITC Limited, being an FMCG behemoth, invested significantly in getting the right granular data. “This meant a lot of investments that we did in terms of systems and processes at our distributors and front-line sales teams,” he added.

The main focus of ITC’s investments in granular data was to ensure accuracy and to get it at the right frequency. “We have a large field force that visits the markets and ITC has invested heavily to help them with digital tools,” Kishore said.

The FMCG giant has also over the past couple of years invested in D2C since it realised the importance of getting first-party information. “We thus created the ITC e store,” Kishore mentioned.

For a consumer tech company like Flipkart, Vijayaraghavan mentioned, the whole business primarily runs on data. “End to end, our entire value chain is revealed through data,” he added.

For instance, Vijayaraghavan shared that delivery speed can be an example. Looking at the conversions on the platform, the company can figure out what requires a higher delivery speed and what requires a lower delivery speed.

“For us, everything is primarily about the consumer journey and we used data to define this consumer journey,” shared Krishnamurthy. “The consumer journey starts right from when the consumer perceives the brand to the final purchase, and along the way come the touchpoints through which s/he can be influenced,” he added.

Krishnamurthy mentioned that as an agency, they don’t own any data, but work with marketers from companies like Flipkart and ITC for the same. The challenges and ways to handle these companies and the data are very different, he shared.

He categorised the data leveraging aspect into three buckets: Incremental revenue generated from high-quality data; Optimal utilisation of this data i.e., being able to do more at the same cost; and how well can one understand the product-to-market fit.

Krishnamurthy added that the third bucket is something that marketers should focus on more.

Srikant further pointed out how the world might be going cookieless soon and that first-party data is rising to be of great importance.

“As a traditional FMCG company, it is very difficult to get first-party data,” Kishore said. This is because a lot of the sales, especially in the categories that ITC operates in, happen via offline stores.

Therefore the company has been mainly relying on consumer touchpoints, to collect first-party data. “We do a lot of activations that help us get the data. ITC is also big on hotels, and hotels are a great source of fetching data,” Kishore added.

At Flipkart though, the challenge is different. Getting the first-party data is not the problem, but acting on it in real-time is one challenge, shared Vijayaraghavan.

Another point he mentioned was how in the next couple of years ‘Search’ which once was the key to knowing consumers best, will get disrupted with the coming of Generative AI and LLMs (Large Language Models).