Data analytics skills plus domain knowledge

IN THE GARAGE/ Marketing consultant to top global companies

Here is highend BPO work out of Bangalore for you. Marketics Technologies gets hold of mountains of data from some of the best companies in the world, cleans and puts them in usable format.

It identifies patterns in them by fitting statistical models, comes up with marketing insights for the client companies and finally identifies a set of actions which will help increase clients' marketing effectiveness.

S Ramakrishnan, CEO and head of business development, Vinay Mishra, vice-president for client services, and Shankar Maruwada, chief marketing officer (he doesn't market his own company but helps out clients with their marketing) set out a little over one and a half yeas ago to set up Marketics. They migrated from companies like GE, Compaq and P&G.

In its second full year of operation (2004-05), Marketics is likely to reach a turnover of $3 million. It has been profitable from day one and has secured no outside funding.

It runs entirely on client support and retained earnings and its EBITDA will make Infosys look plain. Its 40 plus professional staff earn an EVA which an ordinary BPO company will need 300 people to achieve. "The value we earn shows you how high end our work is," says Ramakrishnan.

Such is the traction the company has developed that it is looking for acquisitions in the US and is currently in conversation with bankers.

Says G Ganesh (founded and one-time owner of Customer.Asset), a board member who is also a friend, philosopher and guide, "Marketics does not wish to rely entirely on organic growth, great as it is. With its high end platform, it is looking at capability in the contiguous space. The aim is to retain the front end and take the work offshore," entirely in line with the emerging global development model in IT/ITES.

There is an obvious cost advantage in working out of India but the company wants this to be seen in perspective. Its skills are not low end and there is intensive front end engagement with clients in the US and familiarity in working with them.

Among the main clients that Marketics can publicly speak about are RCI, part of the Cendant group, P&G, Coca-Cola and ESPN, all secured out of the US. Explaining why the work is high end or specialised, Ramakrishnan says that "this work is not done in-house by our clients. We apply sophisticated analytical techniques to existing data to generate insights that can be made actionable".

The work itself requires two parallel skills "� those of statistical data mining specialists and marketing professionals for individual business domains.

This is because Marketics begins with a business problem or is sometimes called in by a company "to look at the data we have and see if we can extract some value out of it". And at the end of the day the output is "actionable analytics", that is an optimum set of activities required to convert the data into actionable intelligence.

With this insight the client can devise an agenda for action which helps increase its marketing effectiveness and of course eventually its return on investment.

This niche area emerged with the explosion of recorded data that has taken place in the last few years, leading to two gaps, identified by Gartner.

One, the gap in analysis. It has lagged behind as there has been a proliferation of data, courtesy progress in communication and information technology. Two, the gap in action which emerges after the data is analysed. Marketics offers a combined package that first addresses the analysis gap and then the gap in action.

The data is of two kinds, customer and consumer.

The consumer data comes from transactions, credit listings and purchasing information and the customer data comes from the multiple touch points that a company has with its customers like inbound-outbound calls, complaints and market research.