I was thrilled to attend Abu Dhabi statistics conference 2013; a 2 day conference that revolved around data, data mining and collaborative efforts to manage and merge the data sets. My excitement has following reasons.   

1. To see that statistics is becoming more mainstream – the participation of members throughout the Gulf, far east Asia and Abu Dhabi government was a pleasant surprise
2. Statisticians have finally decided to enter mainstream business. The approach of every presenter revolved around how information can assist ROIs.
3. Data mining is being discussed at government level and intra-government level.
4. My favorite session was importance of merging Admin data – not only because it was presented well, but because there was a direct relevance between how information impacted revenues, consumer and stakeholder satisfaction   

 What is in it for us, the researchers?

1. If you are working in Abu Dhabi, be prepared for a more visible SCAD.
2. Have you ever considered, developing models of customer database? To explain more, have you ever developed a model whereby most of consumer information is not gathered through surveys but through cooperation and sharing of data within organizations, public sector and private sector? If not, start developing one now.
3. Engage in discussions and conference that talks about open information networks. Lets’ collaborate – recommend names and institutes to operators like  IIR, Ted x dubai etc

 Have a great day. Enjoy interpreting numbers till we meet again

 Ayesha

Why Muslim Tourism is important?

• Muslim tourists globally represent a major niche market worth $126.1 billion in 2011 growing at a higher 4.8% through 2020, compared to global average of 3.8% (Source: http://advisory.dinarstandard.com/travelstudy/)
• Comparatively this Muslim tourism market as a whole is larger than the largest spending tourist market in the world – Germany – and almost twice that of China’s in 2011
• MENA markets represent 60% of total global Muslim tourist outbound expenditure in 2011

Muslim Tourism

Additional Readings

• http://www.crescentrating.com
• Executive Summary of report on Muslim Travelers: http://imaratconsultants.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/DS_CR_TravelReport_ExeSumy_r3.2.pdf
• How the world is gearing up for Muslim travelers: http://lifestyle.inquirer.net/59645/global-travel-industry-gears-up-for-muslim-tourist-boom

I am intrigued about in-depth understanding of Emirati consumers. In my opinion, a lot of work can be done to improve our understanding of Emirati Consumers.  I have tried to analyze this segment in IBM Many eyes here is the link for the static image and the Java based live visualization

And this is following is the first draft of my understanding.

Emirati Consumer – Insights

Additional Readings:

Emirati Women Happy with lifestyle:

http://www.thenational.ae/news/uae-news/emirati-women-satisfied-with-life-in-uae-survey-finds

 http://www.ameinfo.com/todays-emirati-women-emerging-hallmarks-national-320812             

Emirati opinion about quality of life: http://www.emirates247.com/news/emirates/91-per-cent-of-citizens-happy-with-life-in-the-uae-survey-2012-08-14-1.471482

Traveling Habits: http://www.josourmagazine.ae/english/index.php/2011-09-16-13-30-23/2011-09-16-13-31-00/2011-09-16-13-31-18/893-unique-survey-reveals-travel-habits-of-gcc-nationals  

Very good Economic Survey by ADCED: http://www.adced.ae/imageCollection/EconomicReview/Issue/1014201061854536093750.pdf

Emirati Teen Spending: http://gulftoday.ae/portal/443c50ba-b2aa-4431-851f-9eafdf9c1e64.aspx

Emirati Women in Workforce: http://www.thenational.ae/news/uae-news/emirati-women-and-workforce-in-a-clash-of-culture

Hello, welcome and Salam,Thanks for taking time out and stopping by at my blog. Today’s post is about the insight we as marketers are overlooking when we target Muslims. I have posted earlier on the same topic; you can find that post here

I will try to summarize below my conclusion about what insights are missing when we target Muslims.  

• Imagery Driven: I am not sure when marketers will realize Islam is beyond crescent, veils and prayer mats. (may be the end of the Mayan Calendar will be the beginning of that realization – pun intended)
• Muslims are undoubtedly a big and juicy market USD 2 trillion, but there are not enough specialized advertising agencies, other than Ogilvy Noor, for this market segment when compared to other Niche segments like Hispanic Market.
• Young: On an average, Muslims of the world are 27 years old. Your typical YPE, generation Y & generation x. Imagine their lives, facebook, multiculturalism, strong faith and tons of media bombardment trying to tell them that they are backward or fundamentalists. They clearly seek clarity what is stopping brands to offer them that?
• Indonesia & Malaysia have done some interesting advancements in Islamic Branding front like introducing a Fashion brand etc. I crave to see more of that coming from rest of the world.
• Muslims are travelling: I have a privilege to live in UAE (most of you know it as Dubai), everyone here travels at least once a year. And when we do, trust me it is hassle to find comfort from small to large things e.g. availability of water in washrooms, halal food, Ramadan timing breakfast etc. The market spent of Muslim Travellers is around USD 126 billion, tourism industry must try to capture it.
• Less Judgmental: Aren’t we a bit too quick in drawing our conclusions when it comes to religious minority or majority? Here is an interesting article about that

 Have a look at the presentation and slides, hope you will find them interesting.

Enjoy the remaining days of 2012, see you in 2013  

Marketing to Muslims

Map of Muslim Population

Muslim Segment is worth 2 trillion dollars

Marketing Evolves for Women

Missing pieces in Evolution of Marketing to Muslims

Expert Opinion – marketing to muslims

Muslim Population demographics

Muslim Traveler

Marketing to ignored Target Audience

Learn from Quran – Dig Deep

I was just fooling around with Google trends about consumer insight and consumer trends. And I landed on following questions.

Key questions:

• Increasing interest coming from India in consumer research and insight
• Cognos Consumer Insight as the rising trend. Indicating IBM’s lead in analytics, and interest of Business sector in having in-house analytics
• Why consumer trend as a term is popular only in USA?
• Advertising and marketing in Britain relies more on consumer insight than the rest of the world?
• Why UAE didn’t appear in any search worldwide, I was under the impression that research is getting more mainstream here?

Interest from India

Cognos Consumer Insight

Consumer Trend USA

Researchers’ Paradise

Researchers’ Paradise?

Research in UAE

Sometimes, very rarely, you feel great about Your choice of profession. Today is one of that for me.

I am currently attending an ESRI conference on GIS maps and how to integrate the data sets coming from user interaction, system administration etc for data driven decision making.

What has pleasantly surprised me is the interest of diversified set of audience ( CEOs, analysts, engineers, system administrator). And also the fact that public sector in Middle East is actually one of the key players who is using data sets. Don’t get me wrong, when I say GIS I not only mean Urban Planning etc. I also mean statistics Center and how are they using GIS. That’s what I think is cutting edge.

Looking at some of the technologies and software displayed here, it is not hard to say that very soon in Abu Dhabi’s public sector GIS maps will be one of the most common data visualization tool.

Some mouthwatering tools for you

- Abu Dhabi Geoportal tool
- http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/arcgis10

Here are some pictures from the conference.

Here is an exciting press release about the MoU signed between ESRI and Abu Dhabi Govt. http://www.ameinfo.com/first-ever-government-wide-mou-abu-dhabi-322230. If you are working in Analytics within public sector of Abu Dhabi I assure you that good times are coming our way.

Have a great day.

Another morning that made me thinks in which direction is my career heading? Am I going to be the new hype – the Nate Silver of Middle East? Or am I going to drown in the data piles around me? Marketing research sector at large, haven’t introduced a game-changing idea for quite some time now and as the information age is coming of age the need of conventional researchers is reducing. So what should we do….? Lead or follow? change careers?

And guess what! Miss Monneypenny from ‘Sky fall’ was able to answer my question – She says “An old Dog should learn new tricks”

Jokes apart, I recently attended a training course on Business Planning, and I have learnt one key thing. All markets mature and all products age, you must stay ahead of maturity and keep on innovating. Innovate anything like process, customer expectation, resource utilization, market differentiation. But you must innovate if you want to survive.

So what should I innovate in my projects, what should Marketing Research Sector at large innovate?

 What should Marketing Research Sector at large innovate?

In my opinion, we should innovate our human capital. Instead of producing a whole squad of insight discoverers we should aim at producing decision facilitators.

Researchers who can give input on processes, business scorecards, performance monitoring and managing systems, marketing strategies, sales plans and forecasts.

To enable us increase and improve the pricing model of research sector. To help us sustain the competition from social media monitoring industry and consultancy firms.

The slide deck reflects my thinking, and following is what I think is a summary of my vision for MR sector. have a look and let me knowwhat do you think

Data to Decision Value Chain

P.S. And while you are thinking about it, listen to this song – it helps to focus. (or okay lets’ admit it I liked the movie a lot)

We are all hearing about Big Data – The question is what is about and how it effects our daily business.

What is Big Data?

 So what exactly is Big Data? it is nothing but a large number of complex data coming from multiple sources. From business perspective I don’t agree with the general definition of Big Data.

In my opinion, Big data that is useful for the businesses is the huge amount of semi-processed information coming at a fast pace from multiple internal and external sources.  

Big Data is not about Complex formulas it is about hidden insights

Is it something we didn’t prepare ourselves for? For experienced staff that has spent years in marketing research and/or information management and/or knowledge management I think they are prepared for it. But the new joiners and the close to retirement staff are the ones where we might experience problems in terms of handling this large amount of data.

As information managers, I suggest we ask the following questions from ourselves before we start to follow the flow.

• How can we capitalize this information?
• How can we accelerate our career progression through this data revolution?

Capitalizing the information

• Apply the 80/20 rule: 20% of the information streams can be translated into actionable business decisions. Focus on that. I usually take a top to bottom approach i.e. which business decision is most important for the organization, what type of information is required to facilitate that, where are the sources of information 

• Present the solution not the finding: An eye-catching dashboard is worth a million words, but a jaw dropping solution is worth a promotion. It is about time; we (the data analysts) come out of our shells and start proposing business relevant solutions. Solutions about people, processes or the product. 

 Present the solution not the finding

• Simplicity: Simplicity is the key. No matter how complicated the data is and how difficult the solution selling is. If your presentation is not simple enough then you haven’t done your job well. Cut through the chase, get to the point. And get to it as fast as you can.

Career Progression  

Emerging Fancy Designations: Now, we are hearing about a lot of emerging designations in the field of information and decision making (you may also want to read this article about Data Scientist by Harvard business review). But essentially what will be the job description of all of these designations? I think Recruiters will expect you to Turn Numbers into Stories: Find out trends, discover insights and propose solutions. And you can do that, if you have the following skill-set

• Software programming: Basic understanding of SPSS, SAS and similar software and ability to run complex analysis. Many believe that coding will become the part of the job description but in my opinion that probably will not happen.

• Intense Curiosity: The real insights and solutions are discovered by combining observation with trends. If you can see something in the data what others can’t then you are the person for the job. But if you can’t bring anything new to the table, then you must change your career.    

• Business Orientation: Understanding of processes, product development (which can be a bit of engineering too), understanding of marketing and understanding of finance will be essential for a good researcher to propose effective solutions. So you must be an all-rounder.

• Communication: Translate the number into a mouthwatering insight visually, verbally and in writing.  (I admire the way Simon from Team Y&R narrates his stories, here is an example. May be we can learn a thing or two from his articles)

The C-Suite: Gone are the days, when number crunchers were the back office under paid staff members. Today; if you can derive meaning from the data you can actually aim to join the C-Suite of the organization. All you need to do is to negotiate, negotiate and negotiate. I will quote my Ex-boss, “never ever under sell yourself”.  The skill-set is very rare and is in demand. This will be the only skill-set where the numbers of jobs are higher than number of people who can do this job. So don’t undersell yourself.

Additional Readings

Big Data: The management Revolution by HBR

Big Data, Bigger Myths by Accenture

Big Data – the next frontier of innovation by Mckinsey  

Trends helps us to shape ourselves according to consumers’ expectations, following are 3 trends which are affecting the consumer. It is now up to us to use them or ignore them.

I started today with the typical Monday blues. (for those who don’t know, in Dubai we work on Sundays’)

Reports, tables, data sets started to pile up in my inbox and the brain just refused to work. So I went online and surfed through some of my favorite blogs & websites and landed on the results of WPPed Cream. And there is when I found something which can make your weekend start a little brighter.

TNS Digital Life is the winner in the WPPed Cream, Consumer Insight section. I strongly recommend that you have a look at it, you might be pleasantly surprised with the data visualization and cross country comparisons.

Infographic – TNS Digital life UAE-Singapore

The second thing I observed that Kantar has a Creative Director….! Aziz Cami. I am delighted to know that Research companies have finally realized the importance of data visualization and presentation and this is a warmly welcomed move by Kantar. I hope others will soon follow. This indicates that in future, we expect to have a creative division in Agencies’ looking after syndicated data.  Finally.

And now have a look at the Text cloud of top 5 winners’ in Consumer Insights’ category and what I saw was that the focus is on presentation, value added, interactive, digital and contribution of new player Oracle. These key words hint at the trends in marketing research industry…..

2011 WPPed Cream – Consumer insight winners text cloud

Go on play with the data your self, it is available on IBM Many Eyes