India Inc Is Data-Rich but Insight-Poor

Every business conversation in India today seems to start with data. Marketers can see what customers buy, where they buy it, how often they come back, what they search for and how they behave across platforms. Yet Ganapathy Viswanathan, independent communication consultant and author, argues that the volume of data a company holds is no guarantee of insight.

In a new column, Viswanathan says India Inc has moved past the problem of collecting information. The harder test is getting more out of what it already holds.

01 · Dashboards Are Not Decisions

The danger, Viswanathan writes, is that data has become an end in itself. Marketers convert customer information into dashboards, charts and reports without asking whether they have discovered anything they did not know before. A dashboard can show that a campaign performed better among one audience segment than another. It cannot say what caused the difference or what the brand should change next.

That distinction matters most in marketing and advertising. Tracking what consumers do is not the same as understanding why they do it. The dashboard, as Viswanathan puts it, cannot become the strategy.

02 · AI Should Solve Problems, Not Add Platforms

Artificial intelligence and machine learning can find relationships that human analysts miss, predict behaviour and help businesses respond faster. But buying another technology platform will not help unless the organisation first asks a sharper question: what business problem are we trying to solve with this data?

Viswanathan argues that as AI makes analysis faster and more accessible, access to tools will stop being a competitive advantage on its own. The advantage will come from proprietary data, better questions and the ability to turn answers into action.

03 · Look Inside Before Buying More Data

Many companies already sit on valuable first-party data. Banks understand financial behaviour, telecom operators see usage patterns, retailers know purchase frequency and digital businesses track how consumers interact with their platforms. Yet brands sometimes rush to buy external data before extracting maximum value from what they already own.

For marketers, that internal data could reveal customers who are starting to disengage before they leave, which messages influence purchase, or which customers are becoming less valuable. For retailers, it could explain why shopping patterns are changing. For banks and telecom companies, it could predict a customer’s next need instead of reacting to the last transaction.

04 · What Marketers Can Do

Viswanathan’s case points to three practical moves:

• Invest in data literacy so marketing, sales, brand and business teams can ask better questions of data, not just read reports.
• Point AI at specific business problems rather than treating technology as a blanket upgrade.
• Mine first-party data first before looking outward for more information.

Data can tell you that sales have fallen. Insight tells you where the fall is happening, which consumers are behind it, what changed in their behaviour and what to do next. Data can tell you an ad got a response. Insight explains why it worked, for whom, and how the next campaign should be built.

India Inc has spent years learning how to collect data. The next phase is learning how to think with it.

Source: Indian Advertising Media & Marketing News – exchange4media

Mad About Marketing Desk The strategists and writers at Mad About Marketing, writing up what we see in the work every week.