Feeding the information elephant
Recently, I came across an article in "Grocery Headquarters", a grocery retailer publication, quoting Anantha Radhakrishnan of Infosys.
In the article, he says that retailers and suppliers should focus on using information to understand the "point of relevance", the moment at which the consumer is making a purchase decision, which might not necessarily be at the point of sale.
To quote the article:
"'You have a whole set of good technologies like business intelligence and portal technologies, which are the enveloping layers, and you have three crucial technologies -- wireless, RFID and VoIP -- that can all be leveraged in a beautiful way to orchestrate delivering this information and making money from it by reaching it down to the point of relevance for the consumer,' he says.
"Obviously, incorporating these technologies comes at a cost, but experts say making an investment in analytics should not be seen as a barrier to leveraging consumer data. Instead, they say, grocers need to use these technologies in order to see a substantial return on investment by boosting shopper loyalty.
"'The important thing is that the ROI exists, because you've already made a large investment in information with consumer data,' says Radhakrishnan. 'The analytic technology is not the killer in terms of investment. You already bought an elephant, which is a data warehouse. You now need to feed the elephant in order to keep it alive and get better results from having invested in it.'"
Intrigued, I have asked him to share more of his thoughts on this blog. But let me introduce him first.
Anantha Radhakrishnan, “Radha” for short, is an Associate Vice President and key member of the management team for Infosys' Retail, Distribution and Consumer Products business unit. He is an industry veteran with two decades of experience in the global consumer products and US retail industry. Radha has held various responsibilities across multiple business functions such as category management, supply chain, marketing and customer service. At Infosys, Radha works with retail and consumer products clients, helping them design, implement and realize benefits from large scale transformations. He holds an MBA from Indian Institute of Management (IIM) at Lucknow, and a BE (Honours) in Engineering from National Institute of Technology (NIT), Tiruchirapalli.
