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Marketing Intelligence Still At Early Stage In India: Palanivel
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India and most Asian/developing markets still are at an early stage in terms of investments in Marketing Intelligence (MI) and Consumer Intelligence (CI). The spending on MI/CI is about 10 per cent of the advertisement spend in developed economies, in countries like India it is still at two-three per cent. Palanivel Kuppusamy, chairman and chief executive officer, Dexterity, shares with EFYTimes.com the overall picture of market research and analytics sector in India and other countries.
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Saturday, January 24, 2009:
EFYTimes: Could you tell us a bit about the company and the sector it caters to?
Palanivel:Dexterity is a leading player in marketing and customer informatics solutions. Since its inception in 1999, we have been serving the market research and analytics space. Although the genesis was in technology services and solutions, we added knowledge process/operations services for this market and later on added high end analytics capabilities. We serve the market research companies and marketing functions of enterprise customers.
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EFYTimes: Tell us about the organisational structure of the company? What kind of workforce do you have in India and globally?
Palanivel:We have our workforce split into three categories: (a) Market Research Operations (MRO), (b) Marketing and Customer Data Management (MCDM) and (c) Analytics and Insights Delivery (AID). A vast majority of our employees are located in our two of our facilities in Chennai and about a dozen of the employees are located at the customer sites in US and Europe. MRO team typically has science, maths and stats graduates, MCDM team has IT/software professionals and AID team has econometricians, statisticians and modelling experts.
EFYTimes: What kind of solutions do you offer and which is your area of specialisation?
Palanivel:We offer solutions for Marketing Intelligence (MI) and Consumer Intelligence (CI). Under MI, we offer services like survey fieldwork, data processing, analysis and report generation. Under CI, we offer services like customer data integration, modelling and analytics, and insights delivery. Our area of specialisation is in delivering business solutions to the demand side business processes of our customers that include marketing, sales and CRM.
EFYTimes: Explain us how Dexterity's solutions are better than its competitors? And, why should customers rely on Dexterity?
Palanivel:Dexterity is uniquely positioned to address the MI and CI needs of the marketing functions as we have the combination technology, operations and analytics capabilities and offerings to this space. Most of our competition do not have this comprehensive set of services. Dexterity has served over 50 customers in 15+ countries over one decade. That provides a strong track record and rich global experience.
EFYTimes: What type of customers you target the most? Can you name a few?
Palanivel:We have two sets of customers. One is the large market research organisation who takes our services on MRO and MCDM. Other are the MI and CI functions of enterprise customers from verticals like FMCG, ato, retail, hitech, auto and MELT (media, entertainment, leisure and travel)
EFYTimes: Is there any special focus on SMEs?
Palanivel:We have created a new generation fieldwork solution called MR Anywhere which is a platform-based solution that significantly reduces the operational cost and provides an excellent technology platform for SME market research companies in an on-demand business model wherein they only have to pay by use. And for us, it is a step up in the value since our revenues in this case are outcome based and not hourly rate based.
EFYTimes: Dexterity is a KPO, and India is said to be an outsourcing hub, so how does your company leverage upon this for its own growth?
Palanivel:Over the last couple of years, we have transformed from a KPO + IT house into a marketing and customer informatics solutions company. We realise that to gain a sizeable share of the growth in this space, we need to have a scalable business model and up our deal sizes. We have refined our GoToMarket strategy to that effect and we should be seeing the results in the next year.
EFYTimes: Differentiate between India and other countries in terms of growth and business opportunities they provide to Dexterity? Also, share with us the revenue generated by these regions?
Palanivel:India and most Asian/developing markets still are at an early stage in terms of investments in MI and CI. However, it is these regions who have the fastest growth in the MI/CI market.
While the spending on MI/CI is about 10 per cent of the advertisement spend in developed economies, in countries like India, it is still at two-three per cent. Dexterity is still focussed on serving the US and European market since its current business model is better suited for these markets. For APAC market, since the business model cannot emphasise on cost arbitrage, we are in the process of creating offerings that are outcome based rather than hourly rate based.
EFYTimes: What is your opinion about Open Source technologies? Is there any way you leverage, use, sell or support Open Source? Is there any contribution that Open Source made to your company or any contribution your company made towards Open Source?
Palanivel:We have been largely technology agnostic and more business focussed. So in terms of technology, we have embraced open sources as well as platforms from Microsoft, Oracle, Informatics, SAS, SPSS, Confirmit and more.
EFYTimes: How is the global economic slowdown affecting the market you deal in? What measures have you taken to minimise the affect of the slowdown which is essentially touching every business now?
Palanivel:We have received mixed signals. While some matured accounts showed a marginal decline in volume, many new accounts have increased the offshore volumes. Traditionally marketing functions did not offshore much work and this recession has created some interest to offshore and look at low cost destinations. We have increased our reach to the market to combat the slowdown.
EFYTimes: How much of your business has been affected by this slowdown? And, what is the road map the company has chalked out, especially in these hard times?
Palanivel:In the last five years, we have grown 10 times (58 per cent CAGR). This slowdown would bring down our growth rate this year to under 20 per cent. However, over the last year, we have developed new GoToMarket strategies that should be able to get us back on track to grow at much higher rate as in the past. Platform-based revenues are picking up and as this offers significant cost savings to the SME in MR space, this can gather more business during recession times.
EFYTimes: Lastly, what are your business plans for the company?
Palanivel:We are looking at information products (in the MI/CI space) as a highly scalable business model to grow in the APAC market. We would start that with India and after testing the market acceptance, would expand to other geographies. However, this is still in nascent stage and is expected to take at least 15 months before it is launched.
Arti Singh, EFYTIMES News Network
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