Big Update on Big Data

I’m writing this in a week where we’ve been busy in Orlando for SAP’s SAPPHIRE NOW, a huge business technology event. It brings together thousands of customers and prospects to discover new solutions and services from SAP (full disclosure: my employer).

At this year’s show one of the innovations we’ve been demonstrating has been the SAP Consumer Insight 365 service.

I’ve talked about mobile big data in the past. The SAP Consumer Insight 365 service allows operators to use this empirical data whilst maintaining consumer privacy and security.

The cloud service securely unlocks the value of mobile operator network data, providing rich and actionable consumer insights and market intelligence. This new offering helps enterprises and brands have more targeted and meaningful engagement with consumers.

SAPPHIRE NOW show attendees will have been able to hear from Iusacell, the third largest wireless telecommunications company in Mexico, which is the first operator to partner with SAP for this service.

What the service looks like

Here’s an introduction to the service and a quick overview of the UI in action.

Who will use it

If consumers are fundamental to your business, then understanding their behaviour is critical. Analyzing point-of-sale records, financial data, or social media data can provide a lot of answers, but no detail about individuals’ behaviour.

Focus groups and surveys can provide more detail, but they are expensive and lack scalability. What’s more, their sample-based approach can lead to biased answers and inaccurate results.

SAP Consumer Insight 365 is an intuitive, web-based information service that takes analytic research to the next level. For the first time, you can access and analyze anonymized (yes, that’s a word!) mobile operator data to get insight into the activities of millions of consumers. We’re talking about empirical data, or data that represents what consumers actually do, (rather than what they say they do).You can even analyze this information by time and place—and on a local, regional, national, or global scale.

What they’ll use it for

Marketing agencies, advertising agencies, and brands have difficulty answering three critical questions:

1. 1. Where do my customers come from?
2. 2. Who is coming into my store/location?
3. 3. What are they doing?

Some examples of how SAP Consumer Insight 365 addresses these questions:

Brand Value Index

The Brand Value Index view gives you a peek into the browsing habits of your consumer segements, and allows you to see where you rank against your competitors in that regard. For example, you could see how popular your site is with your target audience as compared to your top three competitors.

Catchment

Catchment view enables enterprises and brands to learn about and target consumers from certain geographic areas. For example, this data could tell you how many consumers who match your shopper profiles are within a three-mile radius of your store.

Footfall

Footfall refers to the number of people shopping in a particular location at a given time. The location could be a shopping mall, a sports stadium, a town or district, or any place that has geographic boundaries. Footfall data could tell you the demographics of the people in your store at any given moment, the average time they spend, how far have they’ve traveled, and if they browsed the (mobile) web whilst in your store.

Clickstream

Clickstream tracks what people are looking at while browsing the mobile web and apps. It can tell you who’s viewing your web site, whether you’re reaching target demographics the way you want, and how effective your mobile advertisements are.

SAP Consumer Insight 365 analyzes anonymized web browsing and mobile app activity to illuminate which groups of consumers are using a web site or app, and how long they stay at site or use an app—the ‘dwell time’. This data tells you about web site effectiveness; helps you match advertisements to your actual demographics, location and time; and allows you to compare the performance of your websites to those of competitors.

And whilst marketing is the first use-case that comes to mind, the service is capable of addressing a much wider range of needs. With SAP Consumer Insight 365, brand managers, media planners, retailers, local governments—any organization that works with people—can create better plans and realise goals.