India as a marketing powerhouse; MATHEMATICS Factor 3 of 6
In the past couple of sessions, I had covered how Hustle and Exposure have changed the roadmap of Indian Marketers. Now the power of the 3rd parameter – ‘Mathematics’
Mathematics: The Science of numbers that has emphatically given the edge to global Indians. The thousands of Entrepreneurs, engineers, finance professionals, statisticians of Indian descent globally that are dotting the skies are testimony to the fact that Mathematics has indeed been a very potent enabler.
The derivatives of Mathematics are many but few as compelling as in marketing. The lure of creativity blended with the power of mathematical validation is the new mantra of marketing. Online marketing and the power of extreme numerical accountability that it has brought is shaking the traditional media world as well. Television companies are now being forced to not just respond to viewership but ‘active/passive’ viewership, ‘engagement-driven’ compensation to media companies is becoming the new yardstick and response rate times required are sometimes hours and not days or even months earlier. Increasingly marketers are incorporating and demanding a deeper sense of control on their budgets and effectiveness of programs.
Suddenly the Indian science, math, commerce, economics, stats graduates find themselves in the midst of an exciting new challenge. Corporations are beginning to expand their analytics teams in India; earlier it was more financial analytics; now entire teams are being set up around marketing analytics.
Statisticians played a statistics role for many years; now the emergence of the business savvy India statistician is accelerating quite rapidly. I recently interacted with a friend’s brother who is based out of Bangalore and is with a large multinational bank in the analytics group and is looking to branch out to serve the global markets in analytics driven consumer marketing for financial services. His pitch and story is as professional, as compelling and as ‘global’ as I have seen in my several years of venture capital/ incubation.
One of the persons we recently interviewed was 2 years out of college in India with a commerce degree. The young man currently works for a UK based retailer and he sits on his computer all night long (10 hour shifts) playing with google keywords – changing bids every 5 minutes optimizing their pay-per-click search campaigns with real money. He is given some broad mathematical models and parameters and the rest is Las Vegas! I don’t endorse the rapid-fire optimization approach but it validates the power that mathematics is giving to the young Indian marketer. And there are now thousands of such individuals in urban and non urban India, powered by the internet and driven by the ability to quantitatively and systematically who are beginning to make a difference to the marketing world.
Regalix, a company based out of India and Silicon Valley that I have helped incubate and serve as an advisor on is currently working on a very ambitious and sophisticated analytics project with one of the world’s largest e-commerce companies where they are building complex algorithms to optimize user behavior and maximize revenue impact of each user.
The last quarter saw the acquisition of a Chennai based marketing analytics company for high multiples to a leading BPO company in India. The BPO company clearly identified this to be a high growth area in their Fortune 1000 customer base. Hundreds of entrepreneurs and companies will get created as the power of mathematics gets increasingly harnessed and this is just the beginning of the wave …
CXO Insights
