2010

For decades, the market research industry has helped marketers to listen to the voice of customers, understand market perception and helped them in creating better communication, promotions and even products. Market research fed into marketing Intelligence and consumer Insights that influenced strategic and marketing decision making in enterprises. Have the fundamentals changed? No. marketers still need to understand the market and consumers, maybe even better than in the past and more closely than in the past. Have the means to listen and generate insights changed? Yes, considerably. And more changes are expected.

When so many MR firms are collecting so much information, why do companies still not get excellent knowledge on their customers?

Let’s go to the story of musk deer for a minute. The famous ‘musk’ comes from the body of male musk deer, prevalent in the Himalayas region. The musk deer are said to be going all over the forest in search of ‘where the nice fragrance comes from’, not realizing that it comes from its own body.

Most enterprises have accumulated very rich information on their customers and market with a high potential to generate actionable insights, while continuing to go in search of new data. If the internal data has so much potential to contribute to market and consumer intelligence, then why don’t companies take advantage of this data?

The reasons that are quoted often are:

1. Data is owned by different business units / functions, often in different systems. It’s a hard sell building a business case to justify a holistic integration or even ‘borrowing’ data from another function / unit and spending extra efforts in cleaning, mapping and integrating them before they can be used meaningfully.

2. Internal analytics capabilities are limited to handle such large volume data and generate meaningful insights out of them. This often calls for advanced analytics capabilities and creation of a data environment for the analytical models to perform well. Their IT stops at providing technology and external MR/CI agencies are inclined towards providing more data.

3. There is no established budget for analytics. It has to be often borrowed from MR budgets or the likes. In hard / recession times, it’s very difficult to secure budget for a new initiative like this.

However, the good news is that most enterprises have spent millions in the last decade on data warehouses and BI platforms to create the basic infrastructure for data collection, storing trended data and building analytical solutions on top. The value of these huge investments can be unlocked by a small incremental spend on the analytics to generate market and consumer intelligence out of the data that have been accumulated in these warehouses. This is where a third party, who is neither end user nor a potential gatherer of more data, can take an overview of the existing material and create value for its owner.

“As the strategy guru C.K. Prahalad puts it, ‘Winning in 21st century is not about owning assets, it’s about gaining access to assets’”

This approach is certainly not an alternative to the existing market research approaches. It is a very powerful supplement that aids in creating an ‘integrated view of customers’ by looking into the attitudinal, behavioral and demographic information in a holistic fashion.

Out of the 2000+ MR companies worldwide, ranging from 1 person to 30000 in size, there are only a handful of companies with a clear differentiation and value proposition. The vast majority does the same thing (data collection) the same way (online, CATI, F2F) and even from the same panels. They operate within self-defined boundaries and are at times too narrowly focused on one small piece rather than on the big picture.

Sure, there are reasons why this is the case. MR firms are measured and paid on CPC, size of the panels, incidence and response time. What gets measured gets done! Is capability a limiting factor for the small-medium MR companies to expand their offering / value to their clients beyond data collection? Not necessarily. As the strategy guru C.K. Prahalad puts it, ‘Winning in 21st century is not about owning assets, it’s about gaining access to assets’. Gaining access to analytical talents is becoming easier and even affordable through offshoring / outsourcing. There are mature firms providing high quality analytics expertise from low cost destinations.

Indeed several companies have tried and found outsourcing as a viable solution for two of the three challenges quoted above. It solves the ‘capability’ issue as one can find special players in marketing and customer Informatics offering these capabilities at high quality and broader solution expertise. It solves the ‘budget’ issue as some outsourcing destinations like India provide significant cost advantage, often in the range of 25% to 40% (on total cost of ownership) compared to local providers in USA / Europe.

The third challenge of ‘data readiness’ for analytics and insights can’t be solved by outsourcing alone. However there are a select few outsourcing service providers with platforms to provide targeted business solutions for marketing and customer Intelligence as for the case in discussion. Outsourcing maturity will push service providers to develop more such platforms, addressing the white spaces as they emerge. We have witnessed that in the classical IT outsourcing that has happened in the last two decades.

A few companies that have futuristic thinking and a holistic understanding of the marketplace have embraced newer approaches to widen the boundaries in market research, using outsourcing partners specializing in marketing and customer Informatics. Eventually, market research and consumer Insights would merge and analytics will be an established means to deliver superior insights. More so, since the social media is also changing the way we ‘listen’ to customers and these customers are generating billions of pages of contents per day, making ‘manual inference’ impossible. Someday sooner, analytics and mining will be a necessity; and outsourcing will be an enabler to this business, providing skill availability and cost advantage.

If MR firms can step-up to solve the musk deer problem for the enterprise clients, we will expand the horizon and scope for market research. It won’t be just incremental enhancements to the current market size of $25b but would add a considerable portion of the projected $80b business analytics market to the addressable market opportunity for the MR players.

Is that the new generation MR? In my opinion: “Very Likely”.

2009

Understanding and retaining customers is critical during recession for companies in the consumer goods, automobile and pharma sectors. How does one do that? "The answer lies in Analytics," says Palanivel Kuppusamy, chairman and CEO, Dexterity. 

"Analytics  is critical to business during recession. Companies have all the data they need to make the right business decisions. Yet, at times, they seek answers from outside. What they have to do is apply Analytics to the data that they have knowingly and unknowingly accumulated over the years, study the patterns and make inferences," he explains.

How does Analytics help?
It helps the marketing team deliver more sales, instead of simply working harder. To help companies understand their consumers better, Dexterity, leader in Marketing and Customer Informatics (MCI), has come up with a host of Customer Analytics solutions. The company provides targeted business solutions for market research (MR), marketing intelligence and customer intelligence. 

"As a company we are focused in helping the demand side of business processes of an organisation. We primarily help the marketing  functions, sales functions and the customer relationship management functions of large enterprises," he says. "We work with large marketing research companies, completely addressing their needs in the market research operations, thereby helping them deliver insights to their enterprise customers who continuously listen to the market and customers to drive their decisions and strategies." 

"The advantage Dexterity has amidst other market research organisations is that we offer the value proposition of global sourcing by considerably bringing the costs down. We also leverage technology effectively by adding the capability on top of the process. Hence this business model becomes more attractive for companies to reach out to their customers," says Kuppusamy. 

"We tell our customers, 'You can do more of these data collection at a reasonably good cost'. This seems to be a good message in this market condition," he adds.

"In most situations,  budget for market research is not instantly approved by the management because they don't see an immediate ROI. Marketing costs are always seen as a long term thing, an area where their ROI cannot be calculated," he notes.

MR Anywhere
MR Anywhere is an on-demand, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) application from Dexterity that lets you handle various aspects of the market research process. It is a new generation On-demand Fieldwork solution. 

Market researchers look for lowering costs, shortening research cycle, improving automation and enhancing reach and convenience. MR Anywhere brings together the key components of fieldwork within a collaborative technology platform. With a pay-as-you-go pricing model, it offers complete information security and,  data and information integration across tools.

"With our technology platform like MR Anywhere, which latches upon to global sourcing, one can potentially do double the work at the same budget. Our approach is to eliminate costs in the market research operation and add value," explains Kuppusamy.

Explaining further, he adds, "Even non-research users can come on to the MR Anywhere platform and post their requirements and see that it is taken up and executed by the service bureau in the other part of the world."

Dexterity has close to 18 customers globally jumping on to this platform. Besides customers using this on an ad hoc basis, the company has got two customers who have bought the enterprise version of MR Anywhere to use it as their internal platform where they will do part of the work with their internal service bureau and part of  it done by Dexterity's service bureau.

MI and CI solutions
"Enterprises are collecting enormous volumes of data. Month on month they are spending lot of money in acquiring them. But obviously one of the pain points is that they have not been effectively using the data thus collected," says Kuppusamy. 

"In the current situation, the top management is questioning the spending from MI/CI people.  This puts them to a situation where they should try to do more with the data they are accumulating. In that context, we find our MI and CI services to be pertinent to them where we can help them put their multiple data together and generate the required insights," he adds.

Customer Analytics in India
"We see that there is a  good level of maturity. We are yet to have a commercial case to say that people are willing to spend in India. The demand is actually converted into business only with the need and the amount of spending," says Kuppusamy.

Presently, Dexterity is in talks with two automobile companies and one large retail mart in India who are interested to use analytics for their campaign operations.

EFYTimes: Differentiate between India and other countries in terms of growth and business opportunities they provide to Dexterity? Also, share with us the revenue generated by these regions?
Palanivel:India and most Asian/developing markets still are at an early stage in terms of investments in MI and CI. However, it is these regions who have the fastest growth in the MI/CI market.

While the spending on MI/CI is about 10 per cent of the advertisement spend in developed economies, in countries like India, it is still at two-three per cent. Dexterity is still focussed on serving the US and European market since its current business model is better suited for these markets. For APAC market, since the business model cannot emphasise on cost arbitrage, we are in the process of creating offerings that are outcome based rather than hourly rate based.

EFYTimes: What is your opinion about Open Source technologies? Is there any way you leverage, use, sell or support Open Source? Is there any contribution that Open Source made to your company or any contribution your company made towards Open Source?
Palanivel:We have been largely technology agnostic and more business focussed. So in terms of technology, we have embraced open sources as well as platforms from Microsoft, Oracle, Informatics, SAS, SPSS, Confirmit and more.

EFYTimes: How is the global economic slowdown affecting the market you deal in? What measures have you taken to minimise the affect of the slowdown which is essentially touching every business now?
Palanivel:We have received mixed signals. While some matured accounts showed a marginal decline in volume, many new accounts have increased the offshore volumes. Traditionally marketing functions did not offshore much work and this recession has created some interest to offshore and look at low cost destinations. We have increased our reach to the market to combat the slowdown.

EFYTimes: How much of your business has been affected by this slowdown? And, what is the road map the company has chalked out, especially in these hard times?
Palanivel:In the last five years, we have grown 10 times (58 per cent CAGR). This slowdown would bring down our growth rate this year to under 20 per cent. However, over the last year, we have developed new GoToMarket strategies that should be able to get us back on track to grow at much higher rate as in the past. Platform-based revenues are picking up and as this offers significant cost savings to the SME in MR space, this can gather more business during recession times.

EFYTimes: Lastly, what are your business plans for the company?
Palanivel:We are looking at information products (in the MI/CI space) as a highly scalable business model to grow in the APAC market. We would start that with India and after testing the market acceptance, would expand to other geographies. However, this is still in nascent stage and is expected to take at least 15 months before it is launched.

Source: The Hindu Business Line
July 20th 2009
60 seconds chief questions

A quick 60 seconds chat with our Founder and Cheif-BizDev... Read more>>

Corporate Story Makers
June 30th 2009

Carrying the torch of Dexterity’s fame around another milestone, Pravin, has conceptualized an event for ESOMAR.

ESOMAR showed keen interest in this concept and have let it take shape in the form of an ESOMAR event called “Corporate Storytelling : How to construct and present to senior decision-makers an evidence based business case”.

This event is primarily for the purpose of creating an opportunity for ESOMAR India members to brainstorm to exchange ideas on what’s happening in market research in India and beyond.

This is being held at The Hyatt Regency, Mumbai on the 2nd of July 2009. Dr. David Smith – ESOMAR Rep in UK and Director – DVL Smith Ltd & Professor, University of Hertfordshire Business School will give a presentation on the theme of this event as specified above.

For this event, Pravin is also  on a panel discussion along with Cadbury, Marico, Cadbury, Nielsen and IMRB.

As we shared with you earlier, Dexterity is just not catering to the MR Industry but it is actually shaping IT !!!

We gain Leadership through Listening.

Source: www.expresswebonline.com
June 23rd2009
Tall Aspirations

He vividly remembers his childhood, the rural upbringing and the teachers who shaped him; the culmination of learnings and knowledge with which he has been able to form his own company. Palanivel Kuppusamy, Founder, Chairman and CEO, Dexterity, talks to Renuka Vembu on everything—his progression from staying in a village to now building his own holiday home

Though the first graduate in his family, Palanivel Kuppusamy neither faced any hindrance nor had any resistance towards pursuing education and academics. Exposed to a rural and agricultural background and upbringing in the local village near Erode, he was lucky to have access to a school which paid heed to and placed high importance on education.

Guru’s shishya

He was enrolled at Navarasam Matriculation Higher Sec School. He did his engineering at GCT Coimbatore and post-graduation from IIM Indore. While the engineering college taught him to be independent and to face challenges, IIM was a platform that really nurtured him as a management professional on multiple facets—be it on understanding of organizational behavior, finance, marketing or strategy, the learning from professors and peers was noteworthy.

His greatest inspirations have been from his school teachers who have helped him climb the steps of education and in turn mount the success ladder. Be it his district first in school, or getting into a tier-I engineering college and performing well there, or a strong foundation in Maths and English, he attributes all to his teachers. Kuppusamy reminisced, “All that I learnt as a child helped me a long way even beyond my engineering, with my IIM and right through to my career in the marketing and customer informatics space. I often think of my teachers and school when I look back at the path from my childhood.”

Career path

After the completion of his engineering degree, Kuppusamy started working with DBSS, which later was renamed Cognizant. Working in an organization of 160 people, he learnt and enjoyed his stint there. Importance of people management skills and client expectation management were some of the key learnings he took away from there. During his course of journey, along the way, his passion towards analytics pulled him into founding ‘Dexterity Business Analysts’.

One of the biggest challenges he faced was to keep the company growing, in spite of the economic downturn from 2001-03. He immediately voiced, “It looks like we are getting into a similar phase again now, but I guess I’m better prepared this time! He has been actively involved in building the company from scratch, developing a strong strategy, giving it a unique positioning and driving it towards the set objective.  

As a CEO, his current job profile, apart from the day-to-day activities, entails to establish Dexterity as the leader in marketing and customer informatics. Kuppusamy elaborated, “We want to capture a significant market share in this space and emerge as the largest offshore player with this offering. In the process I am keen to establish that India is capable, competitive and ready as a destination to such high-end work.”

Working with the team

He confessed, “To be honest, it took me a while to figure out the people dynamics in a growing organization. Now I can say that I’m good at building high performance teams, and I enjoy being with such teams.” He wants to build a company that attracts and retains people because of the passion they would have for what the organization as a whole, along with the employees themselves, are doing.

He also believes that self-confidence and a burning desire to achieve, the passion to do what he wants, are the traits that keep him motivated and spirited.

Close to heart

Like many others, he too believes that we as Indians deserve a much better living place. He voices for the need of clean, capable, visionary people to be in power. He asserted, “I am helplessly watching wrong decisions, inactions and dirty politics in government ruining this place slowly. If there is a way I could participate to improve that anytime in future, I would want to do that.”

Family and me

In his own words, his wife has a very complimentary set of skills and characteristics. When he is very optimistic, she plays the role of devil’s advocate. When he is faced with a challenge, she is a great morale booster. When he undermines himself, she reminds him what he is capable of. She helps him put a lot of things in perspective.

Kuppusamy’s daughter who is merely seven, already competes with him in strategy games and table soccer. Like any father, hearing her praise from teachers makes him proud.

He loves plants and music. His passion is cars and holiday homes. The one passion he nurtures is to build two holiday homes—one on the beach and the other on a hill.

Source: www.mrweb.com
May 28th 2009
Dexterity CEO moves to Ohio

Research outsourcing and analytics firm Dexterity has made its Columbus, OH office the US hub to service clients in North America, and moved CEO Palanivel Kuppusamy there from its Indian facilities, where he has been based for the last ten years.

Kuppusamy describes Ohio as a ‘happening place’, and commentes on the move: ‘Operating out of Columbus is a win-win situation for us as the surroundings provide a good pool of research professionals as well as a lower cost of operations.’

Kuppusamy founded Dexterity in 1999, having previously worked for ACNielsen, NMR, Dun & Bradstreet and Cognizant Technology Solutions.

The firm has two offshore facilities in India and employs more than 250 marketing and customer informatics professionals. It also has subsidiaries in Germany and Sweden.

Chennai, India, January 12, 2009: Dexterity, a pioneer and leader in Marketing and Customer Informatics*, today announced that Palanivel Kuppusamy, one of the Founders of Dexterity, will now become the Chairman and CEO. The company’s former Chairman and CEO, Anantha Krishnan (Krish), will move into a Strategic Advisor role.

Having founded Dexterity in 1999, Palanivel was the company’s Executive Chairman and CEO until Krish’s entry in early 2008. Commenting on the corporate re-structuring, Palanivel said, “Krish came onboard when Dexterity decided to move beyond Technology and KPO into Marketing and Customer Informatics. A former Accenture partner, with invaluable experience in Analytics and Marketing Strategy, Krish has been an inspiring leader. He has put in place best practices and processes and helped Dexterity move up the value chain.

Although he is moving into an Advisor role, the momentum we have set will enable the company to grow aggressively.”

Commenting on this change, Krish said, “I have enjoyed building the Marketing and Customer Informatics capabilities at Dexterity. We have developed an industry-leading strategy and process and I’m extremely confident that the team, under the leadership of Palanivel, will successfully operationalize it. While I collaborate with Dexterity as an Advisor, I’m also looking forward to helping the industry build complementary capabilities to make India the destination of choice for the Marketing and Customer Informatics business.”

Speaking on the occasion, Palanivel said, “Dexterity is well poised to capture a significant share of the USD 32-billion Marketing and Customer Informatics market. Over the last three years, the revenues of the company have more than tripled. In the context of the global recession, there is a huge need and opportunity for Market and Customer Analytics. With its expertise, Dexterity can help its clients worldwide understand and, consequently, retain their customers.”

*Marketing and Customer Informatics includes solutions like Market Research Outsourcing (MRO), Marketing and Customer Data Management, Analytics and Insights Delivery.

Palanivel is a Management postgraduate from IIM Indore and an Engineering graduate from the Government College of Technology (GCT), Coimbatore. Prior to Dexterity, he handled assignments with Market Research industry leaders like ACNielsen and NMR. He has worked with Dun & Bradstreet’s software business and Cognizant Technology Solutions.

2008

Source: Economic Times
January 19th 2008

2008

Source: Economic Times
May 30th 2008

Source: Economic Times
May 27th 2008

Source: Data quest
Feb 29th 2008

Source: CTO forum
Feb 15th 2008

Recent research pegs market Research outsourcing to be a $4-billion market. . .

Source: Hindu business line
Feb 13th 2008

Dexterity adds a new dimension to data collection in the MR industry through its Mobile Research Solution....

2007

Source: Market research outsourcing is gaining ground in India
December 26th 2007

Large format Indian retailers and domestic telecom service providers....

Source: Express Computer
December 03rd 2007

Dexterity Bussiness Analysts is on the leading edge of the knowledge process....