While Facebook banks on the smartphone camera to digitalize offline relationships, and sales people use Snapchat to sell real estate, the main challenges for marketers to reach this level of interaction are structural – how to visualize huge amounts of disparate data to get actionable insights fast at a granular level. Here I take a look at how one CMS vendor, WNS, is tackling these challenges by providing an advanced business intelligence platform for brand performance and customer experience analytics to its clients.

Productizing marketing data visualization with Brandttitude

WNS’ Analytics practice has been offering data aggregation, reporting, and visualization of marketing information across multiple industries for more than ten years. Throughout this period the main client need has been to track the brand performance globally and locally, compare it historically, and benchmark against competitors. With its specific domain focus, WNS developed its knowledge of what marketing data to mine from where and which metrics to show and how to present them to marketers. For example, answering top of mind questions such as the fastest penetrating category or the most frequently purchased brand.

At the beginning of 2017, the provider decided to productize the offering through Brandttitude. Brandttitude is a BI analytics cloud platform which ingests data across sources, integrates, and presents them on a visualization layer accessible through mobile devices.

WNS launched the platform with a CPG client, a French food manufacturer. Brandttitude integrated and correlated the previously isolated customer survey reports from third parties such as GfK and TNS, household TV viewing stats from the likes of Kantar, point of sale resources such as Nielsen, and the client’s own shipment data on a quick stats section to uncover insights such brand lift and market reputation. The API pulls automatically from these syndicated databases and clusters and aggregates them according to market and time period. WNS is now planning to procure these data directly and do analysis independently.

With the French CPG client, WNS is rolling out the platform for multiple national markets in a region, where it has added another six data sources. One of these additional resources has been macroeconomic data from Euromonitor and Frost & Sullivan catalogs to identify correlations between volume and value changes with macroeconomic shifts.

How is my brand doing?

With all these different data sources, for marketers to assess product performance means translating the information into insights to create a single brand story. Brandttitude presents key metrics for a brand, such as value phase, affinity score, and repeat buyer percentage in one location. At the back end, it harmonizes and integrates data from 35-40 markets currently and four different data sources delivered in various formats and styles.

It also hosts a KPI library listing all metrics with an option for the user to plug and play KPIs, create customized views and, thanks to a separate API for each metric, visualize it on external tools. For the retail and CPG space, these are ~150 metrics. It further allows the user to correlate these trends and picture them on a single chart or table view (including mapping competitor performance and a drill-down by geography), and annotate and share them with other platform users within a collaborative space.

With a different set of data sources, clients have requested WNS to customize the platform to handle their specific set of needs. For example, for a U.K. insurance client, Brandttitude will have to manage complaints, claims, policy data, and contact center information to map the customer experience with a particular insurer at a personal level. For example, how many policies a customer has, what complaints they raised, how many times they contacted support, and how many days it took to settle a case and settle an amount. Also, the update frequency has to cater to the daily cycles of work. Similarly, customization will be required for a potential deployment for a convenience store chain in Switzerland by adding e-commerce data.

Domain knowledge enabled by technology

The social networks’ three-sided markets of users, content providers, and advertisers come with massive amounts of data at the individual level and understanding who to target with a Facebook dark post or how to publish effective Instagram Stories is a stepping stone. While marketers can use Tableau and QlikView to solve their technology needs for brand management, with Brandttitude WNS wants to position itself as an industry knowledge curator.

For the next versions of the product, WNS plans to accept information which is not in number formats, such as pdf and serve as a data repository for macroeconomic statistics. The key development, however, is the addition of a machine learning-powered analytics layer which will build upon the descriptive features to add diagnostic and predictive capabilities. For example, it will forecast revenue or create simple marketing mix outcome models. WNS targets these advanced analytics additions by the end of 2017.

NelsonHall is currently working on a Digital Marketing Services project for publication later in Q2. For more information contact Guy Saunders ([email protected]).