Centre for Marketing in Emerging Economies

Presents

HBACK

WORKSHOP SPECIAL: UNDERSTANING CONSUMERS IN THE DIGITAL ERA

Message from the

CMEE NEWSLETTER – Volume 1 Issue 1 November 2015

Dear Readers,

It gives me immense pleasure to bring out the first issue of ‘FLASHBACK‘, a newsletter of CMEE. The core of this issue comprise recently completed workshop on ‘Understanding consumers in digital era’ at IIM Lucknow Noida campus during 16-17 Nov 2015.

Consumers are rapidly getting used to digital platforms for searching information, buying products/services and sharing experiences. Marketers realize the importance of the digital medium to understand, interact with and satisfy consumers on a continuous basis. Digital transformation is one of the top trends across businesses. These developments in marketplace have shaped context of the workshop. This workshop has focused on data collection methods on the digital media along with approaches to analyse the data obtained. The workshop was supported by SAGE & PEARSON, SAMSUNG and Zee Media.

I am really thankful to participants from industry and academic institutes who attended the workshop. Through this newsletter we intend to communicate the proceedings of workshop, who could not attend this. CMEE ‘s vision is to be globally recognised Centre for Marketing that studies, understands and educates about consumers, business and public policies towards marketing in Emerging Economies. CMEE’S organising these workshops is aligned with its goal of bringing state-of-the-art consumer understanding methodologies to the emerging market and raising the quality standards in the practice of consumer insight and marketing. I earnestly solicit the co-operation and contribution of all the interested academia and industry representatives to join hand with us in our march towards excellence.

I hope you love reading it as much we loved making it.

To see past events of CMEE and know all the updates please click here.

Thanking you..

CMEE – Chairperson SPEAKS

Prof Satya Bhusan Dash

LEGEND SPEAKS

Understanding Consumers in the Digital Era

There is little doubt that we are operating in a digital era. Accordingly, marketing research aimed at understanding consumers is also increasingly being conducted in social media. I gave a session on social media as a domain for conduct marketing research. I explained how all the steps of the marketing research process can be implemented when the research is conducted in social media. The limitations and advantages of implementing each step of the marketing research process in social media were discussed. Several actual company examples were given to illustrate the underlying research principles. The conclusion is that while it is unlikely that marketing research in social media will replace the traditional methods of conducting research, nevertheless, social media are a useful additional domain for conducting marketing research that can supplement the traditional research methods.

Understanding Consumers in the Digital Era

The first topic I presented in this workshop was forward-looking and asked participants to think about the role of robots and cyborgs in future production and consumption. The topic has enormous importance for global trade as well as local labour dynamics in Asia. Not only are industrial robots a means to reduce labor costs, they also represent a huge market and a threat to existing employment. This is true not only at the unskilled labor end of the market, but also at the high end of skilled labor in medicine, law, accounting, and other professions. Domestic and service robots also promise to transform our daily lives. Cyborgs (human enhancement via biological, electronic, and mechanical enhancements) may not only improve our lives, but may be necessary as a way to keep up with robots. The other presentations I gave in this workshop involved conducting marketing research in the present digital era in which consumers mediate product and service meanings online. Despite the wealth of Big Data analytics involving numeric summaries of online activity by consumers, the “small data” of qualitative netnographic research is needed to understand the rich verbal and visual aspects that constitute much on consumers’ involvement online. The Internet levels the playing field in these area and emerging and advanced economies can both compete on an equal footing.

UNDERSTANDING CONSUMERS IN THE DIGITAL ERA

Day1: 16.11.2015

Prof. Naresh Malhotra

It is fruitful to take Marketing Research to Social Media interface

since people talk in natural and relaxed atmosphere on social Media.

Hence, the inputs will be more realistic.

Prof. Naresh Malhotra discussed six steps of Marketing Research Process which are:

1. Defining the problem :MDP MRP

2. Developing an Approach to the problem

3. Formulating Research Design

4. Data Collection

5. Data Analysis: Text Coding and Categorisation, Text Mining

6. Reporting

Prof. Russell Belk

The session explored the importance of robots at workplace. Some of

the advantages of replacing human labour with robots are uniformity and

precision of work, quick response and decision making and tireless

performance of work.

Robotics has been used in several industries like nursing & hospitality,

military, entertainment, service sector and sex industry. There are 3 laws

of using ROBOTS – they must always obey humans (unless this violates the first law); and they must

always protect themselves (unless it violates the first or second law). Cyborg is a being with both

organic and bio-mechatronic parts. Cyborgs, a part of robotics, has resulted in blurring boundaries

between human/ animal/machine, embodied/disembodied and real self/avatar/robot.

Despite their usefulness, care must be taken with ethical decisions involving robot "rights".

WORKSHOP NOTES

Prof. Russell Belk

Ironically in an era of abundant Big Data, we need

qualitative ethnographic consumer research more

than ever. Ethnography is being called “small data”

since it deals with small no. of respondents. Focus

group is the most common qualitative method in

INDUSTRY and the least common in ACADEMIA; since in Academia, the group dynamics of focus

groups sometimes lead to distorted information. Sometimes FGD can kill a nice product idea.

Visual data collection – pictures & videos are good tools which should be used during qualitative

research. Interviewing is an art. While interviewing, probing is required; more than “why”, the focus

should be on “how”. Thematic Appreciation Test, Cartoon tests, word association, sentence completion,

collage making, picture drawing and storytelling are some of the projective techniques for qualitative

research.

Day2: 17.11.2015

Prof. Russell Belk

Netnography is basically online ethnography. Using

Netnography, positive and negative themes from customer comments can be acquired. E.g. Online

“Unboxing” videos by customers represents a customer perspective, surprise element- unwrapping a

gift, sensualisation, product involvement and more honest opinion of a user in an informal setting.

However, Netnography has a few disadvantages identity validation, loss of non-verbal’s, loss of

intangibles, compensate with emoticons, reliability and integrity of information is questionable.

Prof. Moutusy Maity

There are various systems we need to study, the systems which are connected-Networks –

Individuals/organisation, family/groups, telephone connections,

social media connections and product networks. We need to

identify not just who are the most popular nodes on the social

media network but also their location.

Online social networks provide platforms for individuals to

connect to websites and to form groups. SNA provides a visual

and a mathematical way of examining these connections.

Findings obtained from SNA may be applied to formulate marketing strategy. Prof. Motusy Maity gave

a demonstration of social media analysis using NodeXL software.

Prof. Lipika Dey

In order to get right signals from consumer it is

essential to analyse and interpret consumer

generated texts. Consumers today leave their

footprints on blogs, forums, chat rooms and all

other forms of social media as they express their

beliefs, desires, opinions and thoughts freely as

never before. Organizations are exploiting text mining techniques to analyze the content for insights

about the consumers.

Dr. Lipika Dey discussed how to mine business insights from text. She pointed out that consumer

generated text is noisy- can be spelling and grammatical error, usage of slangs, icon and images and

also social media content is difficult to validate. Notwithstanding the noise, Social media is a big

repository of data and it is cheap to gather large volumes of data. Dr. Dey introduced Stanford Parser

and many other tools/ softwares for text mining.

Mr. Manas Ranjan Kar

This session showed how we can create a

beautiful concoction of text and structured data

(customer demographics, POS sales

information), which enriched the data manifold.

Also, Mr. Manas Ranjan Kar demonstrated how

advanced techniques of text analytics like, machine learning for topics classification, sentiment

analysis, keyword parsing and relationship extraction were used to extract insights.

GROUP PHOTO

CMEE IN NEWS – WORKSHOP -1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_TwfLr6Onw&feature=em-upload_owner#action=share

A Glimpse of Speaker’s session

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yx5kmRVZX4&feature=youtu.be (Prof Naresh Malhotra taking

Session on Teaching Marketing Research)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLeiNJb29fw&feature=youtu.be (Prof Belk Feedback on ZEE

Business)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zup4Yb1QVq0&feature=youtu.be (Dr Lipika Dey taking session

on Mining Consumers generated text through marketing insight)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCJmFYGQ6NI&feature=youtu.be (Prof Moutusy Maity taking

session on Social Network Analysis)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41mKqK79biM (Mr Manas Ranjan Kar taking session at a

workshop organized by CMEE)

A Glimpse of Participant’s Feedback

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4SIKfsuCOM&feature=youtu.be ((Understanding Consumers in

Digital Era)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1orGYCqmJt0&feature=youtu.be (Understanding Consumers in

Digital Era)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrgh8kzcM3o&feature=youtu.be (Understanding Consumers in

Digital Era)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yas6yG8CN0E&feature=youtu.be

WORKSHOP SNAPSHOTS

I enjoyed attendingthe workshop. It wasindeed a goodlearning experiencefor me. The inputsshared by all thespeakers has helpedme a lot!

Ms Varuna Newatiya,

PhD Scholar - IIT

Madars

Emphasised on practicallearning. Very goodintroduction to qualitativeanalysis & Netnography.Theworkshop was wellorganized. I look forward toanother such valuableworkshop in future.

Mr Sharad Gupta, Associate Professor - Delhi Scool of

Business

It was a delight to see learnedspeakers and participants fromleading industry. I couldunderstand as to how we canuse SNA & TEXT mining to

understand our customers.

Mr Arun Kumar Mokrala ,

Asst General Manager- SBI

Mumbai

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