In a fast-paced and increasingly globalized economy, effective market analysis is critical to maintaining a competitive edge. Understanding customer preferences, environmental and economic changes and other non-apparent factors can help marketers and retailers make critical decisions when launching new products, making changes to existing ones and winning new customers. By integrating internal data on products, markets and sales with external data and displaying it through an easy-to-use map interface, key trends and competitive insights emerge. Some call this pattern recognition; we call it Visual Intelligence.

Visual Intelligence
Visual Intelligence is rich, dynamic and actionable information. Obtaining Visual Intelligence is a matter of finding the right data to address specific business questions, then presenting the data in an intuitive way that provides the insight necessary to make critical and essential business decisions.

Executive decision-makers have vast amounts of internal and external business intelligence available to them, but need to understand quickly the trends, opportunities, anomalies and threats contained in those data to make the best decisions. As more data become available, it is increasingly becoming more difficult to find the right data for solid analysis. Further complicating this challenge is that much of the most valuable data are trapped in disconnected databases or in proprietary formats, making them difficult to find, access and use. For example, the best demographic data are often produced by governments through their census activities; however, navigating the complex architecture of government data holdings in a variety of languages and file formats can deter even the most diligent market researcher.

Solving this problem is the mission of FortiusOne’s GeoIQ – a multi-sourced data repository and market analysis tool. GeoIQ aggregates a wide variety of geographic data from not only official government and NGO sources, but also proprietary data vendors and citizen contributors via the GeoCommons Community. To date, over 9,600 datasets have been aggregated - providing over 150,000 attributes that can be visualized on the map.

Visual Intelligence Through Simple Search
Current online data repositories and data visualization platforms enable a narrow list of options of what data can be visualized. Most are pre-populated with various data layers for viewing only through their specific interface. This ‘drop-down menu’ type of data analysis offers the marketer a very limited view of the market landscape which leaves no room for further exploration of trends, possible risks, opportunities or real-time market or environmental changes.

With GeoIQ, we have integrated a simple search function that enables you to easily find, use and share the over 9,000 data layers aggregated from the GeoCommons Community. You can then combine those with your proprietary market data and market research subscription services to paint a complete picture of your market, what is driving it, and what could affect it.

By enabling flexibility and openness in the search functionality, GeoIQ drives marketing analysis miles ahead of existing rigid analysis tools. For example, instead of reviewing a report that pulls the same ten data points on your prescribed market indicators, you now have the freedom to drill deeper into the data. You can see what is driving those indicators, how the external environment is affecting your business and how real-time data can bring invaluable timeliness to your decision-making process.

Dynamic Decision Making
Another component largely absent from current marketing analysis tools is the integration of real-time, dynamic data. For instance, a regional retail marketing manager needs to see his daily performance figures from each store location. Instead of having each store manager compile his numbers, create an individual report and submit it, an RSS feed that automatically updates daily to the regional manager’s dashboard can be assigned to each store. By adding real-time data to your daily analysis, you bypass information lag, thus improving your day-to-day decision making.

With more accurate performance data, marketers can better decide which campaigns to run in-store, what promotions to place in media, or what coupons to pull or highlight. This real-time visual intelligence gives marketers the competitive edge. In addition to integrating internal dynamic data, marketers can also leverage the massive amounts of dynamic data pouring in from the web and mobile devices.

GeoIQ leverages dynamic data from the Web and over 25,000 other real-time feeds. For example, when the VP of Marketing needs to know who is talking about your brand and where, you can aggregate Flickr photos tagged with your brand or see where people are talking about your brand on Twitter. Driven by mobile applications, a wide variety of technologies are becoming location-aware. This is creating a new world of market demographics to allow dynamic customer targeting. While baseline census and demographic data remain great resources, they are updated slowly, and cannot account for rapidly changing market landscapes.

GeoIQ is at the forefront of mapping the Social Web. By integrating and visualizing user-generated content from social networks and online communities, GeoIQ can provide integration of social network sites and custom data feeds for data relevant to your business. When these new market data sources are then fused with traditional demographic data and internal enterprise data, a new world of opportunity is opened.

By ingesting more robust, timely data, GeoIQ provides a more complete picture of your business on which to base better decisions. While the Social Web has created many tools to capture the buzz around marketing, we are only beginning to understand how to harness this information for quantitative analysis, which will lead to improving your enterprise’s bottom line.

The Marketing Case for Visual Intelligence
For marketers looking to implement new analysis tools into their workflow, these core questions must be addressed to get buy-in from internal decision makers. These questions assess the overall ROI and help determine whether the new product will ultimately be adopted.

• What do we get out of this? The first question focuses on product benefit and how the new product goes beyond your current analysis tools, outperforms what you currently have, or is able to give faster, better results.
• What is the implementation process? This question asks about the ease of implementation and compatibility with the marketer’s existing analysis tools. The concern when implementing new products is that they may or may not integrate with your existing marketing analysis investment; they may be stand-alone products, plug-ins, or complementary technologies.
• How much does it cost? The cost of a new product is often the most pronounced question. Depending upon the marketer’s ability to effectively ‘sell’ the product to your key internal decision makers when answering the first two questions, the cost will be a bigger or smaller issue.

With GeoIQ, we have created a product to meet a real need – marketing professionals need an easy-to-use product that enables greater contextual analysis, dynamic results, and ultimately a more accurate and complete picture of their market landscape. Regarding implementation effort, GeoIQ integrates with your existing BI, CRM, LI and GIS tools (Business Intelligence, Customer Relationship Management, Location Intelligence and Geograpic Information Systems tools). It also supports numerous data formats and connects across databases. While integrating with your existing tools and data, GeoIQ pushes past their limitations with an ease-of-use, efficiency and open format that enable widespread usage and better decision making across your enterprise.

Conclusion
While current marketing analyses are key, additional external metrics can be integrated into your marketing analysis to push beyond the current boundaries of traditional tools. The old adage ‘think outside the box’ fully applies when implementing a Visual Intelligence solution. We are literally enabling you to see outside the four walls of your business, the confines of your cubicle and the cells of your spreadsheet in order to provide a more complete perspective of your business and to enable smarter decision making. 

CASE STUDY

Marketing Challenge: Integrating Social Web Data in Product Launch Planning
Situation Camera Corp, a large digital camera manufacturer, is planning to introduce a new low-cost camera to the Indian market targeted at young and mobile consumers. The camera will also have the ability to push pictures directly to photo sharing sites like Flickr, Facebook, Zoom.in or Itasveer. The marketing team recognizes that, in a fast-paced and increasingly globalized economy, knowing where your prospective customers are is critical. In addition, the resources across the enterprise are scarce, and effectively targeting the highest concentration of potential customers can yield greater profits. The marketing team needs to identify the best locations to focus the new product marketing campaign.

Challenge Finding targeted demographic data and integrating behavioral data of online photosharing.

Using Visual Intelligence
The team started by searching GeoIQ for traditional demographics on concentrations of colleges in India. Based upon current social media trends, the team posited that the college population as early adopters would be a good demographic to start the buzz about the new product. The team then found a variety of datasets from which to choose. From the results, it looks like the “District Profiles-Households and Villages” category has the relevant data, “Villages with Colleges.” (See Figure 1, the GeoIQ Search Results Page.)

The team then chose to make a map of the data and get a quick look at where the clusters of colleges are located in India. (See Figure 2, Number of Indian Villages with Universities by District.)

While the team does see some interesting patterns, clusters of colleges are only the beginning of the information they need to optimize their product launch. The team also wants to identify where the college-educated population is located in order to identify those who are likely to be technologically literate and have disposable income. This new data layer is quickly added to the map, showing a second dimension to optimizing locations for the product launch.

While the traditional demographic datasets provided a good baseline, the team needed more information to really get an idea of where there is buzz around photo sharing. They found a dataset with photo uploads to Flickr in India, and added that data to the map to get a better view of where there are high levels of current activity by their target population (See Figure 3.)

Now that the team has the relevant data aggregated on a single map, it is easy to identify the appropriate target markets for the launch. The team can now concentrate resources in the areas that are most likely to include early adopters and to drive buzz for their product. (SeeFigure 4for the map of Camera Corp’s New Product Launch Target Markets.)

Result

By leveraging GeoIQ, the Camera Corp team found critical data for performing an intuitive analysis of how to optimize their product launch. Harnessing traditional demographic data and dynamic social media data, the team developed unique insights into their market landscape, allowing them to concentrate scarce resources on the most active hot spots for their product. This capability sets up high potential for viral spread of the product by focusing efforts in areas that are likely to create the greatest buzz for the specific product type. The team was also able to utilize GeoIQ after the launch to track sales and identify locations that are over-performing and under-performing against their target demographics’ prediction. GeoIQ provides a full life cycle tool for optimizing investments through Visual Intelligence.