Data driven approach boosts company bottomline, research shows

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Manufacturers and retailers are increasingly faced with the challenge of adopting a data-driven approach to keep up with changing consumer demands and seize growth opportunities.

A new commissioned Forrester Consulting study showed that a composite organisation, based on interviewed customers, leveraging the digital data platform gfknewron improved their market value, reduced operational costs, and increased the efficiency of their marketing campaigns – payback on investment took place after less than six months.

Consultants of the research and advisory company Forrester have conducted a Total Economic Impact study of GfK’s data platform gfknewron. The platform helps decision makers in the tech and durables industry to safeguard decisions, gain flexibility and future-proof their business using up-to-date data. Use cases range from planning market entries to tailoring marketing campaigns to improving category management.

The Forrester study compiles insights from interviews with gfknewron users from the Tech and Durables industry. Forrester aggregated the interviewees’ experiences and combined the results into a single example composite organization, a large B2C brand that uses the three propositions gfknewron Market, gfknewron Consumer, and gfknewron Predict.

“In the Middle East region, GfK is committed to helping consumer product companies to deliver growth with data-driven intelligence by offering access to critical knowledge in real-time powered by gfknewron around consumers, markets, brands, and media. We are also continuously strengthening our position & operation in geographies with significant growth potentials like Saudi Arabia, UAE, Iraq, and Pakistan.” said Nacho San Martin, Managing Director - Middle East, GfK.

Sales and marketing teams often struggle to stay on top of market and consumer trends. Reports are valuable for high-level information, but do not deliver enough details, while data from retailers is in-depth enough, but requires a high degree of manual effort to render it useful. The data platform gfknewron streamlines this process by automating most of these formerly manual processes.

The Forrester Total Economic Impact study shows that using a data-driven approach leads to significant increases in efficiency, market value and incremental profits. The example composite organisation recorded, over a span of three years, $4.85 million in benefits versus $1.09 million in costs covering subscription fees, implementation and training. This added up to a net present value (NPV) of $3.76 million and an ROI of 345 per cent – not taking into account unquantified benefits such as easy-to-use dashboards as well as improved and faster decision-making.