Strategy& and INSEAD conduct analytics research
Consulting firm Strategy& and INSEAD have signed a research partnership in the field of demand analytics. In the coming months the partners will conduct research on the link between a company’s ability to master demand analytics and commercial performance. A joint report is expected to be published this autumn.
Demand analytics is the analysis of demand-side drivers of revenue such as pricing, promotion, advertising, customer analytics, and e-commerce; it also includes analysis of consumers’ digital engagement with brands. As a result of new trends – such as digitisation, new technologies and social media – the field of demand analytics has become increasingly important for marketeers and executives. “Three important vectors are driving the dramatic business change that companies now face: big data and analytics, customer-centricity, and digitization. Demand analytics sits right at the centre of these three trends, and developing a maturity framework is a challenging but also very interesting task,” explains Joerg Niessing, Executive Director of INSEAD eLab, the university’s research center in the area of Big Data and Analytics.
To understand the link between demand analytics and financial performance, the partners will perform desk-research, build upon findings of previous studies, conduct interviews with executives and hold a survey among professionals at management level. The objective is to create a maturity model – a methodology that describes the relation between the key building blocks of demand analytics with commercial performance, including a best practice approach.
James Walker, the lead partner from Strategy& (based in London), explains: “The digitisation of business has created massively more data, and we are looking to explore how mature companies are using their demand analytics capabilities to capitalize on this explosion of data and create competitive advantage. Working with INSEAD, we are going to create a framework to understand demand analytics maturity in the context of industry and strategy, and track the impact of use of data analytics on commercial performance.”
The collaboration is taking place over the summer, with a report to be published and joint presentations in key cities during October and November 2014.
