CONSULTING
01
Strategic Marketing

Analytical thinking is fast replacing guess work in marketing. Measuring effectiveness of every marketing dollar has become key agenda of many CEOs.

SMG brings an element of predictability and measurability in an otherwise chaotic market. We do by a thorough analysis of all aspects of markets, customers and products subjecting them to the rigors of our marketing and analytics models.

What you get is a well thought out strategy, unique ways to engage your customers and a well defined action plan to boost your sales and profits. We help you in the areas of:

• Building forecasting models both at aggregate and micro level.
• Analyzing customers' transactional behavior to recognize unusual patterns and untapped profit potential.
• Segmentation strategies for a better marketing thrust and optimizing market investments.
• Analyzing market behavior and competition based on the available research, syndicated and transactional data to help understand organisations true leverage points.
• Understanding the impact of current technology developments on your customer groups to ensure every segment is effectively covered.
• Developing Marketing Score Card for tracking of all the impacting parameter.
• Developing marketing plan with high impact activities.

CONSULTING
02
Enterprise Loyalty Programs

Our team has one of the finest Loyalty experience in the country having launched and managed over 35 well known loyalty programs like ITC Sheraton Hotel Loyalty Program, Pantaloons Retail, Arrow, Pyramid retail and host of others.

We believe that a loyalty program should be as unique as the organisation itself. Supporting and delivering values that are core to your organisation. Only then can you build a great loyalty program that goes beyond just the ordinary. Our deliverables include:

• Program architecture and planning.
• Program metrics and Cash flow planning.
• Most profitable customer analysis.
• Addressing migration issues.
• Identifying value creators and suggest retention strategies.
• Rewards modeling and methods to improve point redemption.
• Establishing systems and processes.

And host of other unique ideas to make your program distinguished.

CONSULTING
03
Category Management Strategies

As the organized retail grows Category Management assumes great importance to all marketing people, particularly for those who manage retail business and consumer packaged goods industry. Well defined category management practices can significantly improve customer stickiness to your store or product portfolio.

If you are a retailer or a consumer goods company, SMG can help you understand the implication of category driven strategies. Using our analytical tools we can help you with:

• Category analysis to find out key drives impacting sales.
• Product affinities to identify shoppers preferences in buying various assortments.
• Cross category purchases to see the effect of tradeoffs.
• Building category competence to effectively counter competitive threat and build successful brands.

And more…

CONSULTING
04
Scientific Direct Marketing Methods

DM has invaded the marketing world like never before. Every company likes to reach out to its profitable and emerging customer groups directly to ensure great experience and to lock them in.

In 1998 Danone brands launched its Evian water entirely thru DM channel and made it a success in Mumbai. Subsequently many premium brands like Sangam Direct from HLL, Domex and L'Oreal Salons, hotels, retail etc have gone this route.

SMG with its valuable experience in this business can help you to creatively connect with and serve your customers directly.

• Understanding of how it works,
• Testing techniques,
• Data management,
• Offer development,
• Campaign development.

CONSULTING
05
Product Portfolio Analysis

This method of evaluation and strategizing assumes great importance when a company has large portfolio of products. It is commonly observed that many products in a multiple product company or in a large retail environment remain unviable or are not exploited to their full potential. Most managers take decisions on the current and past status of the product rather than a careful analysis of its future potential.

Using well known marketing models and tools and combining them with transactional and research data we can help you understand your portfolio much better and assign relative importance to each product for their future direction.

CONSULTING
06
CRM Strategy

SMG can identify and analyze various customer touch points, evaluate internal customer's requirements and sensitivities and integrate your stores and sales processes to deliver those 'Moments of Truth' so vital to your business.

With its vast experience and launching one of the first retail CRM in the country and backed by a powerful data technology system, SMG can help you integrated such processes with your key customer initiatives thereby delivering a magical touch to your marketing efforts.

CONSULTING
07
Strategies to build Marketing Data

Every organisation generates tons of data from dozens of sources. While data is wealth with hidden gems, marketing and operation folks rarely use it. Reasons range from unusable state of the data and lack of understanding of various techniques to inability to generate insights and defining applications for use.

SMG with its technological expertise in handling large data across various types of industries has developed methods that will help you:

• Leverage all types of data generated by the company.
• Indentify more sources for data capture.
• Integrate it with your current IT systems.
• Help you use it to improve sales and customer connect strategies.

SERVICES
01
Marketing Analytics & Predictive Modeling

We work with your marketing data, advertising and media data, promotions and response data, sales and other transaction data to provide you with highly actionable reports like;

• Product marketing effectiveness.
• Ability to recognize patterns and predict future usage of products and customer behavior.
• Understanding behavioral patterns based on expected response to various marketing efforts.
• Building predictive capabilities based on previous history and customer profiles.
• Sales tracking and scorecard - Potential sales analysis.
• Forecasting.
• Campaign performance management.

SERVICES
02
Market Basket & Shopper Behavior Analysis

Increasingly retail is becoming a high performance sport. Market basket also known as affinity analysis allows retailers to easily and quickly look at value and content of their customers purchase basket to understand the pattern in which various products are bought together. Your POS data along with other profile data can generate some extremely meaningful reports which can:

• Analyze customers most preferred and profitable combinations.
• Identify products that are likely to sell more and with which combination basket.
• Tell you what products create stickiness and for which type of customer groups.
• Tell you what to cross sell, to whom and with what kind of probability to sell.
• Select members likely to respond to an offer.
• Select members from the basket analysis based on likely preference cluster for marketing campaigns.
• Help you with areas relating to merchandize and assortment planning.

SERVICES
03
Customer Analytics Modeling

If you are collecting customer information like in retail, telecom, banking, financial services, hotels and similar such industries, we can provide you with analytical reports

• Profitable segment analysis using our advanced RFM modeling and profitability analysis.
• Identifying groups with higher potential to purchase.
• Identifying value creators vs. value destroyers.
• Identify true profit drivers.

And many more such reports...

SERVICES
04
Loyalty Analytics & Program Management

To manage a successful Loyalty program you need some critical info to produce desired result. Following are some the reports that can make your program deliver that extra punch.

• Member scorecard & Program performance across multiple parameters.
• Profit pyramid to see the impact of various segments on profits.
• Analyzing rewards earned and burnt and developing superior revenue model based on rewards utilization.
• Segmenting based on the rewards redemption behavior.
• Member basket analysis.
• Attrition reports.

And host of other reports that can support your program.

SERVICES
05
Churn Management

This model works on sophisticated algorithms that try to indentify non linear trends of purchases. The output results in identifying customers likely to drop in usage or leave the active user group.

• Segment wise analysis.
• Analysis reasons for churn.
• Partial churn analysis in retail environment.
• Impact and churn control methods.

SERVICES
06
Customer Lifetime Value Reports

Unique mathematically driven model to calculate future value of the members and identifying individual monetary value based on probable attrition scoring.
Widely used to ascertain likely resource requirements based on future earning.

• Up to 5 years value analysis.
• Likelihood of individual value creation.
• Segment wise LTV.

SERVICES
07
Campaign Modeling

Managing ROI based campaigns and promotions can be challenging. Our analytical reports can help you

• Predict promotions and communication that works.
• Predicting most effective offers and campaign response rates.
• Select members from the RFM scoring based on likely responsiveness.
• Build target specific campaigns and promotional offers.
• Identify most responsive groups for specific offers.
• Predicting conversion rates.

SERVICES
08
Pricing Analytics

Setting price in a highly dynamic market environment can be a challenging task. Our mathematically driven models can help you answer

• How price sensitive are my customers product?
• Price optimization.
• Which element of my marketing mix should I change for maximizing my profits for a specific product?
• Determining price elasticity.

SERVICES
09
Retail Store Optimization

Most of our tools can work in combination and provide with some unique business cases for your merchandize planning.

• Helps plan future product strategy aligned to true customer needs.
• Attribute modeling.
• Demand planning.
• Store clustering.
• Analyze best sellers.
• Plan unique assortments base on location's specific situation.
• Store scorecard.

PRODUCTS
01
Loyalty & Customer Analytics Suite

This loyalty suite consists of several modules like RFM, Customer Pyramid, segmentation, migration etc. Rich in functionality, it is presented in a unique and easy to use manner to get the most out your loyalty member and non-member data.

PRODUCTS
02
Product Affinity & Basket Analysis

Easy to use and highly intuitive product, our shoppers' basket analysis is quick to crunch huge data and can be used for many situations like cross sell, customer clusters, pricing, offer development, assortment, and many others. Our team of experts can work thru the implementation process to ensure you get maximum result out of this highly advanced product.

PRODUCTS
03
Forecasting

A powerful module, this forecasting tool allows you to predict sales of relatively new products which have been on the shelves for limited period. The model also allows for assessing price sensitivity and attribute modeling when a new product is being tested for introduction.
Variation of this product can be used to predict member sales and other loyalty related information.

PRODUCTS
04
Attrition Control System

This module helps you to understand the attrition pattern of each customer and group of customers and shows. This model works on sophisticated algorithms that try and indentify customer's true transactional behavior and non linear trends.

PRODUCTS
05
Life Time Value Calculation

A unique mathematically driven model to calculate future value of the members and identifying individual monetary value based on probable attrition scoring. LTV is widely used to ascertain likely resource requirements based on future earning. An advanced model LTV uses several carefully selected parameters to map actual patterns and provide highly accurate scores.

PRODUCTS
06
Sales Dashboard

A powerful scorecard and tracking system that manages your sales force and integrates it with the HO system. It provides up-to-date analysis of sales and account management which when analyzed can add significant value to the selling cycle.

INDUSTRY SEGMENTS
01
Retail

Retail is going thru a major transformation and with the coming in of large global retailers like Target, Carrefour, Wal-Mart and changing concept of professional retailing in luxury goods, automobiles, white goods, electronics items, consumer services etc., the game is likely to change remarkably. As a retailer you need to protect your most precious assets i.e. your customers. You need to understand

• a.What is the expected profitability of my loyalty program and what is the likely payback period?
• b.Which of my customers will buy what merchandize in their next purchase cycle and when?
• c.How do I predict attrition and its impact on my quarterly store wise sales plan?
• d.How do I plan my campaigns and with what offers to have high conversion rates?
• e.How can I effectively use market basket analysis to optimize my store merchandise and create offers that sell?
• f.How do I build in predictability in my promotional plan?
• g.How to assess customers' lifetime value and build my budgeting plan accordingly?
• h.How to run high impact campaigns?
• i.Optimize your stores with merchandise that are most preferred by the customer profile of that particular store.

SMG can work with you in many ways from providing your team a complete consulting in building your customer management strategies to outsourcing your analytical requirements.

INDUSTRY SEGMENTS
02
Malls

Malls though a part of retail, need more focused strategies that are driven by different set of parameters. Being relatively new to the economic scene in India and also in many other parts of the world and having been hit by a gut-wrenching recession, Malls need to relook at their strategic perspective. Currently Mall owners in India pay little attention to generating traffic and revenue generation strategies leaving individual tenant to fend for himself. As the market matures and fixed rental paves way for revenue sharing there is a pressure to

• a.Generate additional footfalls.
• b.Manage the existing customer base.

SMG provides consulting for strategic marketing platform and services for the Mall owners to create a large pool of regular buying customers.

INDUSTRY SEGMENTS
03
Telecom

Both Mobile and Fixed line business face pressures on various counts like managing hyper competition, protecting its more profitable customers, increasing ever falling ARPU, increasing the usage of VAS and data services, managing attrition and migration and more such barriers to further growth. Newer technologies like the 3G and services like number portability is putting more pressure on the companies to retain their customers on one hand and get them to subscribe to higher order services on the other.

SMG has created fairly sophisticated analytics solutions to enable Telecom firms to manage their customer base profitably by developing deep insights about their transactional behavior.

• a.Protect the high end and profitable users and keep them within the network
• b.Indentify VAS and price plans with high appeal and identify customers with high probability to subscribe to these plans/services
• c.Help enhance ARPU by analyzing data for what works and what does not
• d.Create a 360 degree view of the customer for the company to develop multi dimensional relationship, customized offers to prop up the usage
• e.Integrate customer info with the service data to predict critical issues for different customer clusters
• f.Identify potential value creators and value destroyers for the company to create appropriate strategies
• g.Predict which customers are likely to discontinue or drop usage
• h.Identify customers with large potentials and influencers in the group

INDUSTRY SEGMENTS
04
Consumer Goods

From mass marketing to relationship driven marketing, consumer goods companies have come a long way from one size fit all strategy to highly customized strategies. Large companies attempt to move from traditional media to direct marketing, marketing driven out of data analytics thereby focusing on true one-to-one marketing. In particular, such methods allow to respond to more consumers in a personalized and relevant way - something no other medium can achieve.

• a.Building database of consumers to track purchases.
• b.Using data of primary sales to retailers to predict sales pattern, Market Basket analysis, forecasting etc
• c.Analyzing promotional spends to asses their current and future impact on sales. Predicting types of promotion that work or those that won't.
• d.Run loyalty programs
• e.Building category management expertise to deal with the retail customer more effectively.
• f.Using Product Portfolio Model to give direction to each brand and position it where it actually belongs to based on their market potential and ability to compete.

INDUSTRY SEGMENTS
05
Airlines & Hotels

The two industries lifeline depends on complete customer orientation. Understanding them and their habits is key to the survival of these industries. From the time customer thinks of traveling and till the time he completes his itinerary, entire organization is completely focused on their comfort and beyond the ordinary experience. These companies perhaps collect the richest data about their customers and if leveraged intelligently can help these companies create extremely powerful marketing programs based on individual customer learning. Areas like:

• a.Preferred customer analysis based on his usage of the services.
• b.Up-selling techniques.
• c.Cross selling other value added services based on his likely intent.
• d.Predicting when a customer is likely to move out of the services.
• e.Building rewards that are relevant to him and help him realize full potential of his accumulated rewards.
• f.Sales forecasting.
• g.Complaint analysis and its impact on usage.

INDUSTRY SEGMENTS
06
Banks & Financial Services

For banks and other financial institutions, SMG can provide valuable solutions and services in the area of customer management. This has great relevance in today's scenario where marketing budgets are being questioned, marketing functions being made accountable and their performance measured. These strategic initiatives are geared to provide activities that can be justified by the Return on Investment.

SMG believes in the practice of customization of marketing activities for each individual customer as this will help improve average customer value to the institution.
These include:

• a.Understanding current customer profiles based on transactional and demographic data
• b.Providing meaningful insights on what such profiles mean in terms of customer value to the banks
• c.Developing marketing ideas based on such analysis
• d.Tracking dynamic behavior of the customer based on internationally renowned techniques and practices
• e.Tracking most profitable customers based on statistical methods and techniques
• f.Developing customer communication plans based on individual preferences and needs
• g.Providing event based activity plans, such as attrition management, churn management etc.
• h.Developing a platform for experience based brand building
• i.Customer Management related support and training
• j.Product and Brand development strategies.

LEADERSHIP
01
Harsh Vardhan

Harsh Vardhan has had an exciting career of close to 30 years in marketing, advertising, loyalty and analytics with some of the leading companies in leadership and strategic roles. He has been closely involved with retail, consumer goods, telecom and hospitality industry.

He has launched and built several well known global brands like Bacardi, L'Oreal, General Motors, Columbia Tri-Star and some household Indian names like Moov and Symphony. He led several new initiatives in the country like building the first loyalty analytics product and setting up one of the first Customer Management and Marketing Technology companies.

He was Country Head of Draft Worldwide world's largest Direct Marketing & Loyalty firm where he led DM initiatives for Bausch & Lomb, United Distillers, Danone Brands, Orange Telecom and Unilever that won global acclaim. He was head of Percept's Analytics and loyalty business where he delivered some truly innovative work for Arvind Brands, Pantaloon, FedEx, Airtel, and Botox. He served as the CEO of Dialogue, one of the first Internet Marketing and online CRM firm owned by D'Arcy US.

He spent several years in advertising and strategy planning with JWT, O&M and McCann where he worked on brands like J&J, Warner Lambert, Boots, Exxon and Titan. He also served as regional planning director for Dettol at McCann.

He initially worked in marketing and sales for 11 years at ITC where he was Marketing & Sales Manager and at HCL Computers Delhi.

Harsh has done his masters in Mathematical Economics and is a Post Graduate in Management from XLRI, Jamshedpur. He has written several articles on marketing in leading publications and also consults with senior management on growth strategies and turning around brands. He is a keen sportsman.

LEADERSHIP
02
Dr. Ravi Shankar

Ravi has done his M. Tech from IIT Madras and has a PhD in Computer Science. He has over 31 years of experience working and advising many companies like CMC, Telstra (Au), NEC and CGU insurance, R&D departments of a reputed Indian companies.

He Co-architected India's first commercial vector processor. He is visiting scientist at Carnegie-Mellon University and member external advisory committee to the dept of Computer Science, LaTrobe University.

Ravi taught in Australian Universities for several years. He is an expert in Logic Programming, Expert Systems and Advanced Computer Architectures and has specialized competence in Business Analytics, Forecasting & Predictive Modeling, Video Collaboration and Embedded Systems.

He developed several state of art products/systems (like commercial Vector Processor, Prolog compiler, and Indian Railway Reservation System). Founder IT Seers.