Submitted article by Romi Mahajan

Chief Commercial Officer, Quantarium

The world of technology is known as much for its hype as it is for its legitimate innovations.  Atone level, this is understandable. Dreamers can only accomplish big things when they dream big and followup on those dreams with supporting rhetoric. At a different level, however, it serves to dupe consumers, customers,and investors into alchemist fantasies that often defy the laws of physics.  What we need, naturally, is a balance.

With AI, and claims about it, we as a community have come to the point where we have to decide if we are okay with “fact-checking.”  Are all claims about AI fair and accurate?  Do all companies that claim to be “doing AI” pass muster in that regard? After all, haven’t many organizations referred to any and all of their “data”initiatives as AI? Have we diluted the term so as to make it meaningless?

Discerning investors have started to kick the AI tires.  Highly skilled Scientists and Engineers increasingly refuse to be beguiled by marketing claims, choosing instead to dig deeply into the code and methodologies surrounding its production before allowing themselves to be recruited by the countless organizations that seek the limited supply of talent. 

Perhaps more relevant, still, is that people in all roles ask one fundamental question:  “Is there any relevant and practical application to the AI work you are doing?”

On all these matters, Quantarium can hold its head high.  From “Real AI” to “Real Applications of AI,”Quantarium is altering and enhancing our notions of what is possible in residential real estate, the world’s single largest asset class.

Take for instance an important but mundane question, likely asked by millions of people every day.  “What is my house worth?”  Several pundits will offer several answers to this question, no doubt.  But, will the answers be accurate and in this case, what does accuracy even mean?  What data goes into the answer?  Do we have all the data we need?  Is it all available? Do the data we collect account for every single aspect of the house that could or should go into the valuation? 

Now take an extrapolation of this question with magnified scale.  Imagine you are the CEO of a large bank that “owns” half-a-million residential mortgages. What is your portfolio worth?  How much risk are you holding in the portfolio?  Are you too exposed in a particular geography or demographic?  Do you have sufficient data and the ability to process and make sense out of it?  Can you do this all with the speed that is called for by regulation and market conditions?

These questions are easy to pose but hard to answer.  Further, while these questions may not seem “sexy,” they underscore the reality of the single biggest source of economic value and for most families the single largest source of equity.  Using AI to drive accuracy, speed, and scale in this market is complex, genuine and incredibly important.Indeed, real AI applied to real industries with real outcomes is the name of the game. Therein lies the balance we seek, the convergence of both the hype and of the reality.

Marketing Darwinism caught up with Samir Saluja, Co-Founder of DeriveOne and former Microsoft Learning Executive.

Marketing Darwinism: Samir, you left Microsoft to start DeriveOne with your partner Jason Talwar. Tell us about that transition.

Samir: Microsoft played a huge role in my development and in my understanding of the needs of customers. It also helped me understand the importance of data and using data for scale. What Jason and I realized is that despite the importance of data in the organizational and business world, most were not conceiving of it correctly or in the most efficient manner. We saw that “data for data’s sake” started becoming the essential mantra for companies and we wanted to help them avoid that trap. Thus we started DeriveOne. We consider Microsoft a key partner so still are in the ecosystem.

Marketing Darwinism: “Data for data’s sake?” What do you mean?

Samir: Data has come to be seen as an important commodity and as such companies are scrambling to ingest it and even hoard it. Ingestion is great but what about digestion? How do you use this data? What about data-overload? What about useless data? What about “fake” data? The point here is that data is not an unalloyed good if not trained on decisions. In fact, we believe you need to look at the decisions first and figure out the data needed based on the decisions not just because “data is good.”

Marketing Darwinism: You have a very varied background. Tell us more about your journey.

Samir: Thanks Paul. I have spent time in the Peace Corp, as an entrepreneur, as a business-owner, as a Microsoft employee and as a volunteer. All of these experiences helped me converge on being who I am today, personally and professionally. The Peace Corp helped me learn to listen, empathize and act. Being an entrepreneur taught me about risk and reward. Microsoft helped me understand the importance scaling through partnerships. DeriveOne has helped me realize the value of focus.

Marketing Darwinism: Why should an organization hire DeriveOne?

Samir: We believe that partnering with our customers in the context of what they need and what their customers need is crucial. We help organizations, medium to large and even some startups, use data to hone and focus their customer segmentation strategy, the cognitive diversity of their teams, and to inculcate the culture of decision-driven data. We believe that methodology matters, eliciting what the true decisions that need to be made is key, and delivering accountability is necessary. We are humbled daily by interest in our company.

Last week I moderated another Social Media Today webinar as part of their Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of Social Data Made Simple: Getting Started with a Strategy. This webinar featured Ira Haberman (@irahaberman) Director of Storytelling at BrainRider, Ned Kumar (@nedkumar) Digital Strategist for FedEx and Sean Williams (@Colorado2NYC) Consumer Promotions Social Media at JetBlue Airlines. We discussed how to get started with a strategy around social data.

Here are three key takeaways from the webinar:

1. Know your audience – with social data there are so many sources that one could get lost trying to pull it all together – start with the end in mind in regards to what audience you are trying to reach. Let that be your guide post for any decisions on data.
2. Sentiment is better on a group than on a single post – Sean talked about how JetBlue tracks sentiment on a group of travelers (ex. travelers to the Northeast in a snow storm versus one tweet from a single traveler)
3. Most important part of a data strategy – is to commit to having a strategy for your data. According to the panel that is most often overlooked.

To get a copy of the slides or to listen to the replay, please click here. You can also scan the highlights of this webinar on Twitter by reading the Storify below.

Our next webinar is titled Cultivating Creative Thinking for Customer Engagement; be sure to sign up for it or view the schedule of other upcoming webinars here.

With the proper planning and strategic thinking, a competitive advantage is something that your company can definitely create in today’s dynamic and fast moving marketplace of business niches.

Furthermore, your business can become particularly competitive in capturing those magical areas of competitive advantage if you can learn how to really understand your consumer market and the desires of your customers. Luckily, this can be done through the application of a more modern approach to strategic planning as we’re about to cover now.

The rewards of going through the strategic planning steps we’re about to cover cannot be understated. By learning to truly understand your customers and use that knowledge for planning your business strategy, you’ll be able to outpace your competitors, improve your brand image and develop client loyalty in a dramatic way that improves your bottom line.

Fortunately, for those who are really interested in this kind of consumer centric planning strategy, there is a detailed and highly informative new ebook I ran across from the people at Insights In Marketing which is packed with practical advice. Here is an overview of that advice.

Strategic Planning in a Nutshell

In essential terms, strategic planning involves taking advantage of expansive customer and market research to gain insights on your overall market, your competition and, most importantly, your actual customers. With this information, you can then build a thoroughly fleshed out strategy for staying ahead of the curve in terms of delivering the right products to its best possible customer as often as possible.

Strategic planning involves asking yourself some probing questions about where your business is headed, how you think it should get there and then using the answers to these questions for achieving the goals you really want to see come to fruition.

The Value of Serious Customer Research

The core of truly effective strategic planning lies in researching your customers in deep detail and really getting to know them. As the strategic planning ebook explains, there are many aspects of the research your company is going to have to do if it wants to really make an effective competitive advantage come to the fore.

The most crucial part of this data gathering will mean finding out as much of the key information about your customers as you possibly can and then using it for product development, better customer service and improved brand development.  You need to find your customers drives, desires and real passions as they relate to your niche in the marketplace.

This process really starts off with something called a consumer insights audit, which helps you understand the following essentials about your consumers:

• Their general habits
• Their most often used media and communications tools
• Their awareness of ads and their habits for viewing them
• General buying and browsing habits
• Where they consume content most often on the web
• Their use of your particular brand and how aware they are of you
• The perception your brand and product offering creates

Finding the Ideal Offer for the Ideal Customer

Through the kind of deeply targeted research of your customers that we just listed, and by applying its insights to your existing business and consumer market, what you can really hope to achieve is the holy grail of effective business promotion. This holy grail consists of finding your ideal, “perfect” customer and delivering to them the offer they absolutely perceive themselves to need for solving their problems and doing this better than any of your competitors is capable of achieving.

If you can pull this feat off, you have the effective equivalent of a secret weapon working for you. Why? Because customers who really feel like you understand them and are serving their needs will be extremely loyal to your brand for the long run and for any new offers you develop.

Furthermore, these kinds of customers will spread the word on your behalf to others who are in the same situation as them. This is the kind of marketing and promotion that’s worth a lot more than any paid advertisements and it goes a long way towards making you immune to competitors.

Developing the kind of consumer insights culture that deep research of both needs and customer psychology applied regularly will help you outpace your competitors. You don’t want to be in a race to the bottom with your competitors. Instead, you want to beat them by knowing your customers and winning their loyalty through that knowledge.

For a more in-depth look at this topic, you can check out the details in this ebook by Insights in Marketing.

The industry is constantly changing and it can be a challenge to keep up. How can you tell the difference between the skills that are necessary and those that are just hype?

Checkout Formstack’s new infographic on the “7 Skills Marketers Need to Succeed.” They studied the trends and crunched the numbers to help digital marketers prioritize their goals. You might be surprised by which marketing skills are worth developing.