AvantGarde

On 29th January, 2016, MBA, IME Department, IIT Kanpur hosted an interactive seminar on “Advances in Consumer Research, Passive measurement, Big Data Micro segmentation and Social media listening” by Mr. Prithvi Raj, Lead-Mobile Insights, Nielsen India. The speaker began the seminar by asking questions on consumer research which the students answered enthusiastically. He updated us with some of the steps Nielsen follows during consumer research which starts from understanding the audience,  finding the need gap, proving your product effectiveness to the people and  finally ends with sales effectiveness measurement. He also made us aware about the need of innovations, SWOT analysis and competitor analysis before launching a new product. Market research can be done without explicitly conducting surveys-by observing consumers and monitoring their online behavior. For example, Amazon shows recommendations to users by observing their online behavior.

The speaker also gave us insights about the consumers’ world. He mentioned some amazing facts about ways through which data is collected from users in which major contributor is Smartphone. The reason being smartphone usage says a lot about the users, his choices, interests and buying pattern. He shared with us a startling fact that an average Indian spends about 186 minutes daily on their smartphone. Surprisingly, calls contribute only 9% of the time while time spent on online activities is 52% (42% on online apps and 10% on browsing). The rest of the time is spent on games (37%) and messaging (2%). With these facts he also shared with us the concept of location based marketing which can help suggest people to set up their shops specifically in an area. The other point discussed was that brain activity can divulge a huge amount of information about an individual. Sensors and eye tracking techniques are used to understand the decisions of the consumers. Buzz on social media is analyzed to gauge the sentiments of people which companies can use to convert them to consumers. Another interesting fact was the use of smartphones to decipher what the users watch on their TV sets. Some apps capture the surrounding noise of smartphones by turning on the microphones for very short intervals. This data is referenced against a reference library which creates a  finger print and tells that at particular time which TV show is being watched by that particular user. Complete privacy is maintained in this regard. It was a very informative seminar which gave us startling facts and insights about consumer research, and different passive measurement techniques which are being used by companies.