Sighting The Insight

Data and machines hold the key to the customer insight process in the future.

- Harish Bijoor

The customer is alive. For now. Till machines become our customers. And they shall be more alive, I guess.

Let us talk about human customers for now.

Alive customers are rich in insights. They live, they breathe, they move around, they see, they touch, smell, taste, and are forever insight-dropping entities. Every move of theirs, and indeed every breath of theirs, leaves back clues. So many clues that one is unable to harvest all of it. Not that too many are keen to harvest them either. And that is a separate subject altogether.

Insight is what marketing is really all about. Brands that build themselves around the insights they have collected, do well. Those that accidentally have their offerings moored to insight do well. And those that do not, fall by the wayside.

How do you then turn customer insight into growth? Let me take a simple example for the sake of this piece. Let us go street-watching. And let us see what we can learn. And let us see how it can create for growth.

The questions then for a start: How rich and prosperous is a city? Is there a quick measure and metric for this one? Amidst all the granularity of a city, is there any learning to harvest and monetise at all? Can customer-insight off the streets lead to growth? Let us see.

Is a city rich basis its per capita GDP? Is a city defined as prosperous basis the number of cars its citizens buy? Or by the ownership pattern of homes? Or by the investment profiles represented by the stash in their banks as notional cash or in their lockers as paper securities and gold on hand?

Having spent a fair bit of time with macroeconomic data that talks of prosperity indices that are complex and aggregated to a country, I have been in the quest for a measure that is true-blue micro, true-blue representative, and true-blue comparable across cities and economies, never mind the colour of their politics.