Author: admin

10 Data Exploration Tools To Explore in 2023

by adminin data exploration tool, Explorazor, Uncategorized

All of us are in need of some assistance when trying to conjure up magic from data. While the skills lie primarily with the human, choosing the right technology stack is arguably equally as important. Let’s look at some of the top data exploration tools in brief that you can investigate further: 

  1. Explorazor

Explorazor is a data exploration tool that unifies all the datasets of a company into a single, consolidated dataset. The aim is to provide Brand Managers with a single source of truth that they have ready access to at all times, which helps them identify red flags and explore revenue growth opportunities faster than ever, via point-and-click root cause analysis, instant data pivot extraction, a simple search interface, and many other highly relevant features.

Brand & Sales Teams find it extremely easy to adapt to and use this data exploration tool as a complement to Excel and take their hypothesis testing speed to the next level.

  1. Microsoft Power BI

One of the most renowned Business Intelligence platforms in the world, Power BI supports dozens of data sources, allowing users to create and share reports and dashboards. Power BI comes with strong visualization capabilities, also giving users the option to merge reports and dashboard groups for straightforward distribution. 

Data exploration tool comparison: Power BI vs Explorazor

  1. Tableau

Tableau is again a very popular data visualization tool, competing with the likes of Google Charts, Grafana, Power BI, Qlikview, and others. 

Tableau dashboards provide users with advanced visualizations like motion charts, bullet charts, treemaps, box-plots as well as basic pie charts and histogram views.

  1. Looker Studio / Google Data Studio 

Looker Studio, formerly known as Google Data Studio, is a data visualization and dashboarding tool that helps create interactive reports and dashboards quickly. It is typically used to create ‘stories out of numbers’. One of the biggest advantages of Google Data Studio is the automatic integration it offers with many other Google applications like Google Ads, Google Analytics, and Google BigQuery. And it’s free.

  1. Looker

Is this data exploration tool the reason Google changed its name from ‘Data Studio’ to ‘Looker Studio’? We wonder…

Looker is a data visualization tool that is in direct competition with Power BI and Tableau. Instead of describing Looker’s capabilities here, we’ll leave you with a link that compares all the 3 tools with respect to certain parameters. Click here

  1. Datapine

Datapine offers dashboards according to function, industry, and platform for users to make data-driven decisions. It is suitable for beginners as well as advanced users, providing suitable features for both. Datapine’s advanced SQL mode lets users build their own queries. Overall, Datapine is focused on providing an interactive + fast BI experience.

  1. Jupyter Notebook

This web application is for developers to use live code for report creation based on data and visualizations. Jupyter Notebook is free and open-source, and is compatible with a browser or on desktop platforms.  However, Python’s package manager, pip, or the Anaconda platform have to be installed. Jupyter supports 40+ programming languages as well.

  1. ThoughtSpot

An analytics platform where users can explore data from multiple source types via natural language searches. ThoughtSpot is hugely successful with SpotIQ, its AI system, which located deep insights on its own, uncovering hidden data patterns and trends

  1. Domo

The Domo website describes it as ‘a low-code data app platform that takes the power of BI to the next level to combine all your data and put it to work across any business process or workflow.’ Providing +1,000 built-in integrations/connectors for data transfer, Domo also supports custom app creation to integrate with the platform, also allowing easy access to visualization tools and connectors. If you are a business that does not have your own ETL software and data warehouse, Domo could prove useful for you.

The Ultimate Data Exploration Tool?

Dare we explain what Excel does? 

Not in a hundred years.

We have, however, dared to identify some of Excel’s shortcomings when it comes to seamless data exploration. Scouring multiple files in Excel and extracting pivots from each proves to be tedious. 

To prevent productivity from being hampered, we developed Explorazor, a data unification platform that integrates all of a Brand Manager’s data into one single dataset. This includes Nielsen, Kantar, IQVIA (for pharma), and the common primary sales, secondary sales, media spends, etc. 

On Explorazor, users extract data pivots on the integrated dataset instantly, are able to conduct root-cause analysis on multiple datasets at a time, and query the data using an extremely simple search interface. 

This results in managers wanting to test out more hypotheses, conduct ad-hoc analyses themselves, and pry higher quality decisions from the same data that they previously worked on, on Excel.

Explorazor is a great fit for Excel wizards to work their magic better. Have a look at the website.

Take an Interactive Product Tour of Explorazor!

PRODUCT TOUR

Explorazor Product Updates – Seamless Root Cause Analysis, Conditional Formatting, and More

by adminin conditional formatting, dual axis charts, Explorazor product updates, Insights Team, root cause analysis

Hello there, welcome. We’re excited to share the latest updates made on our data exploration and analysis tool, Explorazor, covering root cause analysis, conditional formatting, and dual axis charts. We’ll also highlight the benefits that Brand & Sales can derive from these updates. 

If you have headed directly to this blog without browsing the website, here’s a quick introduction to Explorazor: curated especially for Brand and Sales Teams at Pharma and Consumer Goods companies, Explorazor allows users to explore their data faster, better, and easier than on Excel by combining all datasets into a single consolidated dataset that can be queried via a simple search interface.

Let’s dive into the updates:

  1. Root Cause Analysis 

As the name suggests, root cause analysis is the process of arriving at the heart, or the root cause, of any event, usually an event of concern. 

Root cause analysis (RCA) helps managers determine why the problem occurred in the first place. For example, in Explorazor, users can identify the reasons behind market share degrowth and find out which state or city was responsible for it.

How it works is that the user identifies a table value, clicks on it, and is able to drill down into any hierarchy or drill across KPIs from multiple datasets in the same view. Here’s what it looks like:

Explaining ‘drill across’ further, users can navigate through multiple datasets at the same time. 

This is a highly interactive method for users to rapidly diagnose issues or pain points, allowing them visibility into multiple data cuts simultaneously. We recommend skimming through the blog ‘Conduct Drill-Down on an Integrated Dataset via Point-and-Click’ to see an example of how RCA is conducted on Explorazor via double-clicking. The example is complete with screenshots from Explorazor. 

We’re also working on further updates within root cause analysis – the freedom to sort values automatically will soon be available.

  1. Conditional Formatting

Users can provide business rules on their data, above or below which they want the data to be highlighted differently. This allows them to quickly identify outliers or get a clear view of when they hit a target.

Actual product screenshot - Explorazor - Conditional Formatting

Another significant benefit of conditional formatting on Explorazor is the option to pin a conditionally formatted query directly to the dashboard. The conducted query is saved to the dashboard for future use and keeps auto-updating, so there’s a lot of smoothness added to the querying processes of users, who would have previously had to re-run the same formatting procedure multiple times. 

There are a lot of design-based options for conditional formatting, like color-coding areas of improvement in red and success zones as green. 

  1. Dual, and Triple Axis Charts

One may have to look at the trends of multiple different KPIs at the same time. However, not all KPIs will have similar values – one could be in the millions while another could be in the 100s. Correlating such figures is a challenge.

What Dual Axis Charts do is allow users to see the trends in all these different KPIs together, so that they can correlate how changes in different KPIs affect others. 

Actual product screenshot - Explorazor - Triple Axis Charts

Users also have total control over each axis w.r.t the metric shown. For example, Axis 1 can display the trend of Market Share while Axis 2 displays Internal Sales. 

With the ability to look at the trends of multiple KPIs of different scales at the same time, the relationship between two or more measures can be demonstrated and correlations, wherever the nature of the values allow, can be viewed.

Triple Axis Charts? Works the same way as Dual. 

Get More Out of Your Datasets, and Your Skill Set!

Explorazor is not here to radically change the way Brand & Sales teams interact with data. We simply propose streamlining scattered datasets under a single roof, accessible to all. 

Explorazor focuses on letting each department and individual use their skill sets in solving real market problems and finding ways to promote their brand and grow their revenue, instead of getting embroiled in the daily tangles of multiple tabs, inaccessibility to needed datasets, and undue dependence on others for ad-hoc analysis. Insights Teams benefit greatly too – check out the reasons why an Insights Team should consider Explorazor for their managers. 

If you are a Brand Manager, learn about the 3 Types of data analysis Brand Managers can perform super-easily on Explorazor. 

We hope you find these product updates useful. If you have any suggestions or queries, do not hesitate to contact us; we are more than happy to connect and help.

Take an Interactive Product Tour of Explorazor!

pRODUCT TOUR

Retaining Sales Talent is Becoming a Challenge. Here’s What You Can Do About It

by adminin sales, sales talent

In a November 2022 report, Gartner’s Chief of Research Craig Riley raised a pressing issue – sales talent attrition is on the rise, and retaining them will be harder than ever in 2023. His comments were based on an August 2022 survey conducted amongst 900+ B2B buyers, which concluded that a staggering 89% felt ‘burned out from work’. It’s not just the USA. The Great Resignation debate is live and raging across the world.

Forbes echoed the same sentiment as Gartner, recognizing the growing talent crisis in sales and cautioning managers of the various harms that come along with high attrition rates, one of them being damaged customer relationships. Every sales manager reading this bit will resonate with the word ‘catastrophic.’ Forbes research also indicated that more than half of employees feel overworked by their employers.

OF SELLER DRAGS AND ‘COGS IN THE MACHINE’

One of the key causes that leads sales talent to this level of exhaustion is termed ‘seller drag’, a phenomenon that causes employees to procrastinate on work and deliver lower output. One of the roots of this ‘seller drag’ lies in employees having to undertake non-value-adding administrative tasks, and a consistent emotion of being just a ‘cog in the machine.’ 

To tackle this problem, many organizations opt for tools and/or platforms that help departments achieve their objectives. We find advocacy for this approach from Stephen Diorio (Executive Director of the Revenue Enablement Institute and an author, among other things) who discussed the need to reconfigure the daily workflows of sales professionals by simplifying their technology stack. 

However, there’s just a slight problem with this strategy:

No one is particularly interested in using these technology stacks. 

SIMPLICITY – THE ROOT OF TECHNOLOGY STACK ADOPTION

Greg Munster, Global Sales Operations Director of Canonical, quips 

“After years of supporting sellers with sales enablement systems at IBM, Red Hat and Lenovo, I’ve learned the key differentiator – and driver of value – always comes down to simplicity, intuitiveness, and user adoption in the eyes of the sales user of process or tool.”

Technology stacks carefully curated by Insights Teams, for example, for their sales managers, are perceived as ‘complex’ and capable of only compounding the daily data-related struggles of these sales champions. As such, they steer clear of such tools right from the get-go – our own research at vPhrase Analytics found that out, when we interviewed senior Brand Managers from globally-renowned firms such as HUL, Marico, Godrej, and others. While tools were available in abundance, their usage was next to none.

RETAINING SALES TALENT – WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT

If you’ve kept up till now, you would’ve noticed we 

  • Recognized a very pressing issue in the form of higher sales attrition in 2023 
  • Pinpointed the tiring daily workflows of sales professionals as a core contributing cause to the attrition, and 
  • Spoke about the well-intended approach of concerned departments like Insights Teams in building technology stacks, but the approach being ill-received due to the stacks being too complex to adopt and use

It’s a focused discussion we’re having. Let’s continue:

A SIMPLE AND EFFECTIVE TOOL FOR YOUR TECHNOLOGY STACK

We dove into the heart of the matter and found the ideal solution: consolidating data from multiple Excel files. Sales Managers have multiple datasets at their disposal and have to constantly shift between and examine multiple Excel files to extract a data pivot or test out a hypothesis. They face multiple challenges en route; access to some files is missing or delayed, standardizing and updating these files is a consistent, time-consuming process.

Sales Managers revert to Insights Teams to help them with ad-hoc analysis. Help does arrive, but often late, rendering the insights to a great extent, valueless. Can’t blame the Insights Team, either. They’ve got tasks other than conducting ad-hoc analysis for Sales.

We’ve developed Explorazor, a simple data exploration tool that integrates multiple datasets into 1 standardized dataset and provides unified data access to users. Users query the consolidated dataset via a simple search interface and extract instant data pivots. Explorazor is powered with double-click, or point-and-click drill-down for instant root cause analysis. The idea is to ensure on-time and independent data analysis for managers, and these features prove pivotal in helping them identify market opportunities and internal and external issues. Explorazor contributes to revenue growth and employee satisfaction simultaneously.

There are many features we haven’t talked about here, like the ability to download desired data pivots as CSV files and take them to Excel, or the super-clean user interface that makes managers want to work on Explorazor. You can also read the blog we’ve written on how Explorazor differs from Power BI.

CONCLUSION

Retain sales talent by easing their day-to-day challenges. Explorazor can help simplify the daily data exploration activities of Sales Managers, and it’s a very simple tool to understand and adopt, and effective to boot. While it’s not the only tool you may ever need, it certainly is the perfect complement to Excel, and therefore a must-have tool in your tech stack.

Why not take a quick look at Explorazor? Here’s an introductory video to get you started, and you can schedule a call with our solutions consultant for the full demo. 

Take an Interactive Product Tour of Explorazor!

PRODUCT TOUR

Positioning Your Brand to Drive Preference ft. Gartner

by adminin brand, brand advocacy, brand commitment, brand preference, Explorazor, functional benefits, Gartner, personal benefits, Positioning, societal benefits

Driving brand commitment is a major goal for organizations. Gartner defines brand commitment as ‘the degree to which audiences prefer the brand to alternatives (brand preference), feel a personal connection to it (brand connection) and advocate on its behalf (brand advocacy)’. Thus brand preference, brand connection, and brand advocacy are all subsets of brand commitment. 

Now, once solidified, brand commitment is more than just a regular revenue growth strategy. Brand commitment can drive customers to purchase your products at a premium. It drives customer loyalty and advocacy, where the customer promotes your brand on your behalf. Internally, employees already working with the brand seek to be retained, while human talent scouring for opportunities are attracted to your brand. Thus the need for creating brand preference and commitment is clear. 

Creating A Strong Positioning 

Now, there are 3 kinds of benefits that a brand can provide: functional, societal, and personal. An organization can choose to position itself using any one or more than one type of the 3 benefits, to initiate brand commitment. To drive preference, brands need to create strong positioning, which can be done by

  • Avoiding negative advocacy – this is done by branding through functional benefits
  • Communicating a personal benefit that a consumer can derive by being associated with your brand, and demonstrating simultaneously, how the fulfillment of that personal benefit leads to a ‘greater good’, i.e. societal benefit

Personal benefit is understood as a psychological need that a customer fulfills via brand association, while societal benefits range from ethical production, like zero or negative carbon emission, to any other sustainability initiative.

Positioning Through Personal Benefits, Or Using a Combination of Benefits?

Gartner estimates, from a 2022 research conducted among 1,999 consumers, employees, and B2B buyers, that while providing a personal benefit, like a sense of belonging or a sense of growth, is almost thrice as impactful as the other 2 types of benefits, the type of industry matters too. Positioning through personal benefits yielded the best rewards in the manufacturing, healthcare, and natural resources industries. Brand commitment in the technology industry is boosted through functional benefits, while the same connection works between retail and societal benefits.

Brands can use all the 3 benefits at once or combine personal and functional benefits for best results. The latter is because lack of functional benefits drives negative advocacy, so avoiding that, and inserting the impact of personal benefits for positive outcomes, is the best recipe. 

Societal benefits combined with personal benefits as your brand positioning to drive brand commitment is also good, but excluding personal benefits to combine functional and societal benefits yields the least favorable results, comparatively speaking. 

How Will You Position Your Brand?

Even if you miss out on customers actively advocating for your brand, or feeling a core connection with it, you can still focus on making your brand preferable over the others by choosing the right set of benefits as per your industry and other relevant factors. Just make sure that you include personal benefits in your brand messaging. 

Organizations can use these 9 categories as frameworks to develop their own positioning through personal benefits:

  1. A sense of belonging – Making customers feel like they are a part of a certain community
  2. Life purpose – Making customers feel like they can achieve their ambitions through your brand
  3. Growth – Self-explanatory; making customers feel like they can achieve personal development through your product/service
  4. Self-consistency – Basically telling the customer ‘You live a certain life; adopt our product/service to be consistent with the way you live your life’
  5. Autonomy – Helping the customer take charge of their life, or be independent
  6. Competence – Related to autonomy; helping people feel competent, or experts, in something
  7. Security – In other words, offering peace of mind
  8. Esteem – Telling the customer ‘Associate with our product/service and feel confident’
  9. Energy – Providing adventure, or entertainment, or the strength needed to go through life, as an offering

Regardless of How You Position It..

You will need all the intel on market, competition, forecasts, opportunities, threats, and a clear understanding of your own internal budgets, allocations, performance, etc. Right now, if you are doing it in Excel, we have a better proposal for you. Explorazor is refreshing the way users explore data by consolidating all datasets that an organization possesses and bringing it under a common Explorazor roof. There, they can extract data pivots instantly and conduct actual root-cause analysis on the consolidated data. 

Users work faster on Explorazor, because they have ready access to all the data they need, pivot extraction is instant, and their laptops operate faster than before due to data being held in server as against the browser.

Explorazor users, typically Brand or Sales Managers, depend less on the Insights Team for their analysis and test out far more hypotheses than before. 

Take an Interactive Product tour of Explorazor!

Product tour


We credit Gartner with all observations taken from their survey report

Data Consolidation – The Need of the Hour for Brand & Sales Teams

by adminin data consolidation, Excel, Explorazor, root cause analysis

In this blog, we’ll be highlighting some issues that Brand & Sales teams face with data on a daily basis, and making a case for how data consolidation can remedy these core issues:

So Many Data Sources, So Little Time

Brand & Sales teams deal with so many different datasets at a time: there’s primary sales, secondary sales, MS Value, Media Spends, Research Data from Kantar, Nielsen, or IQVIA, depending on the industry; and more. 

To manage the plethora of data, professionals mainly use Excel. The research we conducted at vPhrase, interviewing 100+ experienced industry professionals, validated many of our hypotheses when we initially started out developing Explorazor, the data exploration tool designed especially for frictionless data exploration. Some of these hypotheses were:

  1. Managers use Excel by default – without any additional support

Excel has become one of the constants of life – all operations are conducted on Excel, without any other tool to even support or augment it. Power BI does extend some value, but it’s meant for dashboards and not exploration.  

To think of replacing Excel was not even in the minds of the professionals we interviewed.

  1. Excel is great – but it does pose some problems

For what man, walking the face of this earth, can deny Excel’s greatness? Shakespearean passions aside, Excel is THE standard for a reason – it facilitates data analysis, holds enormous datasets, enables pivot extraction, conditional formatting and n other functions.

However, we believe that there is an easier way for Brand Managers to conduct data exploration and analysis, without leaving Excel entirely.

As such, we spoke about it with Senior Managers – they agreed that while Excel is the go-to for all number crunching, insight extraction and strategy formation, having to work on multiple datasets means more time consumption and manual work. Laptops process data slowly as compared to a cloud server, which also contributes to time consumption. Furthermore, due to fragmented data storage, managers often have to rely on Insights teams for ad-hoc analysis and crucial insights, something they would rather prefer to live without.

After validating both our hypotheses, we presented Explorazor to our audience – and asked them to gauge one central benefit that Explorazor provides:

Data Consolidation – The Answer To Many of Excel’s Drawbacks

Explorazor is a data exploration tool that lets users conduct queries, obtain data pivots, and conduct root cause analysis via point-and-click, on an INTEGRATED, CONSOLIDATED dataset. There are various industry terminologies going around, like data stitching, data consolidation, unifying datasets, combining datasets, etc., all refer to the same thing. The Explorazor team cleans, standardizes, and combines the datasets for a single-platform usage through Explorazor.

A clarification here: Explorazor complements Excel, and does not replace it.

An Integrated or Consolidated Dataset Means 

  1. Better correlation between data points

Your primary sales is doing good, but your call average has actually been declining since COVID. Such data correlation is easily obtained on platforms like Explorazor. 

Similarly, Dolo made huge sales during the pandemic, but it actually sold more due to HCP recommendations and ad campaigns, rather than calling and field sales efforts. Now that the pandemic has receded, it comes to light that the rural areas have largely been ignored and a sizable chunk of sales comes only from select urban areas.  

Such data exploration and correlation is much easier on an integrated dataset.

  1. Better root cause analysis

We’ve written a separate blog just covering this point. Explorazor helps users arrive at the ACTUAL root cause of events, because users can conduct drill-down and drill-across on the entire data at a time. 

It’s all about better decision-making.

  1. Time and Effort Efficiency 

Managers spend more time testing hypotheses and conducting ad-hoc analysis independently, without having to revert to Insights Teams. Explorazor lightens the laptop burden of processing huge datasets by storing data on server, accessible via browser. 

An Integrated or Consolidated Dataset Also Means 

  • Faster analysis, faster laptops
  • Better, and easier analysis
  • Greater Independence for Brand Managers
  • Greater space for Insights Teams to focus on long-term strategies
  • A space for users have ready access to required datasets
  • A space for users to collaborate on projects
  • A data-driven work culture
  • Greater revenue 

Take an Interactive Product tour of Explorazor!

PRODUCT TOUR

Getting Omnichannel Marketing Right in Retail

by adminin Omnichannel, Retail, Uncategorized

In a previous blog, we saw how in retail, building the right omnichannel strategy is everything. Today we’ll discuss some omnichannel strategies that retailers of today can/must use to be successful.   

Google’s e-Conomy SEA 2022 report speaks about how SouthEast Asia is three years ahead of the projected time in reaching $200 million in gross merchandise value in 2022 itself. GMV is defined by Investopedia as “the total value of merchandise sold over a given period of time through a customer-to-customer (C2C) exchange site.” GMV is a strong growth signal of how well a company is performing w.r.t revenue, and is also an indicator of the rising digital adoption in consumers all across the world.

Google’s report emphasizes the undertaking of laser-focused marketing strategies in order to take advantage of the plethora of opportunities the region’s digital economy offers.

Sticking to our topic, what are some of the omnichannel marketing strategies that retailers can utilize to elevate their performance and grab market share in huge markets such as SouthEast Asia? Let’s explore:

Omnichannel Strategies in Retail

  1. Ensure Performance Across Channels

Being present on all channels is not enough; performance consistency and focus on delivering the best possible experience to customers, regardless of the channel they choose to interact with your brand, is an important yet very overlooked aspect of an optimal customer experience. 

Just fathom this, how many retail brands do you know that have a super-fast mobile shopping experience going on, just like they provide on desktop? Very few, in my own experience. Those that do, like Myntra, are far more conducive to natural mobile search and purchase than other prominent brands in the Indian market. 

Between two apparel websites that offer almost the same products, how much of a differentiator is mobile & app speed to you? (image format)

  1. Ensure Consistency Across Channels

Again, criminally underrated, because most brands are present just for the sake of being present, without care for ‘how’ they appear to the customer. It’s a very myopic outlook, which can be tackled by building a very strong brand identity system. A brand identity system is a set of brand guidelines that include logos, symbols, characters, and more, basically designed to keep the brand experience consistent, literally everywhere. Think of brands like Pepsi or Coca-Cola. They have been delivering a universally consistent brand experience for decades now. 

Consistency is not limited to branding. Retailers need to ensure that their in-store offers are consistent with their online claims. Similarly, the customer should feel a sense of service efficiency when interacting with your brand across all online channels, and in-store. 

It’s easy for consumers to spot which brands are genuine in building a top-notch omnichannel experience for their customers, and which are just ‘ticking the boxes’. And once you lose the attention of the customer, he’s as good as gone.

  1. Use Technology

By 2030, 125 billion devices are estimated to be connected using IoT, putting the number at 15 connected devices per user to handle. Your omnichannel strategy must consider the new wearables such as smart watches, to deliver increasingly personalized services, as customers are demanding. The data on personalization is there for all to see. A staggering 8+ people out of 10 are willing to share their personal details if they are treated to more personalized (read ‘better’) deals from brands. 

If you are behind on providing fully functional and maintained payment gateways on all fronts and automated chatbots, we take it you haven’t begun to use technology, but most chances are that you have done that. Those are staples today, but remember that the companies who adopted them first got the first-mover advantage. Updating to the next steps such as integrated shopping experience on new wearables will one day be as important as payment gateways.

  1. Learn From The Best

One of the best ways to stay ahead of the competition is to benchmark the best and replicate contextually. The consistency, performance, and technological advancement that Amazon has displayed through Amazon Prime is exemplary. Bringing customer data out of siloes from across devices and channels and connecting them, offering benefits and membership discounts, excellent product service at costs customers are willing to pay, are all elements of a revenue-generating omnichannel experience. 

Speaking of retail, Nike offers one of the best in-store + online integrations in the world. 

Credits: LinkedIn Pulse

The omnichannel retail infrastructure that Nike has put together is the very definition of seamlessness. Whether one is at the store, shopping online, or wants the product delivered to their home or the nearest retail store, everything feels automatic. It’s so good, you don’t notice it.

Take an Interactive Product Tour of Explorazor.

Product tour

Conduct Drill-Down on an Integrated Dataset via Point-and-Click

by adminin Uncategorized

Brand and sales teams have to drill-down (some call it double-click) on data all the time to conduct root-cause analysis. Let’s explore how to conduct deep exploration, or drill-down and drill-across, on Explorazor.  

Explorazor is a data exploration and analysis platform that mitigates most of Excel’s drawbacks that Brand & Sales Managers have when working on multiple files on Excel. On Explorazor, managers work on a single integrated, standardized dataset that produces data pivots instantly when queried via a simple search interface.

(Hey, we’re improving! In addition to this blog, be sure to check out more updates to the root cause analysis feature)

Arriving at the ACTUAL Root Cause with Explorazor

Why do we say ‘actual’? Because with Explorazor, users conduct drill-down on the entire data at a time. Such exploration power allows managers to start their investigation, say from a Brand, all the way to an SKU, in an almost seamless fashion.

Let’s use screenshots from Explorazor to understand how Explorazor eases data exploration via drill-down and drill-across: 

  1. Here we are on the ‘Ask’ section of the Explorazor screen, where we have the Dimensions and Measures to the left and the space for simple querying at the center-top.

The following query has already been entered: ‘Quarterly Market Share Value of Alpha Supplement (Brand) for All-India’. We did this by entering four keywords: 

  1. MS Value
  2. Quarterly
  3. Alpha Supplement
  4. All India

Filtering by Alpha Supplement in ‘Brand’ and All India in ‘Market’ and opting for a simple line graphical representation shows us that MS Value has been more or less consistent over the past 12 quarters, but displaying gradual degrowth since the spike in Q2-21.

2. Since the Market Share is down, has it impacted Market Sales in the same manner as well?

Let’s find out by viewing the ‘Absolute Growth in Market Sales of brand Alpha Supplement on a quarterly basis’. 

We are now interested in performing a root cause analysis of Quarter 2 – 2022, so we click on it to do the same. Notice the clean interface that allows readers to take in all the information at once.

By the way, when it comes to intuitive query recognition and time period filters, Explorazor is much smarter than Power BI. To quote a couple of lines from the linked blog “If there are certain parameters in Power BI which you want to look at but which are not present on the dashboard, you cannot do so until you edit the entire dashboard. 

With Explorazor, users can drill down into as well as drill across a particular data point”.

3. Back to the steps: Market Sales Value has been highlighted as the area of our interest. From the list of further possible exploration areas, let’s select ‘Geo classification’ and analyze the results:

4. Drilling across by adding ‘Market’ to the set of applied filters, we learn that even in this degrowth, North has performed exceedingly well. East, South, and West are major areas of concern, in that order. 

Simplicity At The Core

Explorazor has simplified the data analysis process of managers through multiple custom-built features such as the drill-down & drill-across we saw above. The intuitive search interface and the ease of display navigation, in addition to the core offering of working on an all-inclusive, integrated dataset make Explorazor the first choice for managers wanting to ease their day-to-day data exploration and decision-making processes.

Take an Interactive Product Tour of Explorazor today!

PRODUCT TOUR

How Data Analysis Helps Marketers

by adminin data analysis, Explorazor, marketers, Marketing

Previously we discussed the not-so-subtle relationship between branding and sales. Now we’ll see 3 ways how data analysis serves marketers, namely plugging their spendings, achieving precise segmentation and targeting, and assisting in creating personalized offerings for customers.

We also propose integrating your datasets into one standardized, consolidated dataset that helps you conduct data analysis much faster and better than before. We’ll discuss ‘how’ later in this blog, under the heading ‘How to consolidate the Data Analysis process’.

Let’s begin:

How Data Analysis Helps Marketers: 

  1. Plugging Spendings

Marketers previously had little idea where they spent their budget. They just did so on the basis of their experience and intuition, with little data to back it up. If the campaign failed, the corrective course of action too was based on assumptions, experience and intuition, since the manager of the past 

  1. Did not have access to the data points he needed
  2. Could not / would not utilize technology to analyze the right data points

Hold on, are we describing the marketers of today?

Unfortunately, we are partially doing so. This is because while access to the data points is no longer as big an issue, the inability or unwillingness to analyze the data to make data-backed decisions is still something prevalent amongst marketers. One of the primary reasons found is along the lines of ‘Oh, marketing is not an exact science, so we cannot treat it as such. Marketing is equally an art as it is a science’. And while the creative element will always remain, the fact is that marketing is increasingly turning into a science. The best marketers no longer rely on just themselves; they let the data influence their decisions. 

Data analysis helps marketers know where they are spending their dollar, so they can avoid ineffective spending. The need to spend budgets to test hypotheses that may prove to be baseless is eliminated. Additionally, marketers can, within the same budget, conduct A/B Testing and undertake more campaigns than before to increase their reach, awareness and revenue. 

Mapping out and optimizing the logistical costs of making products available in stores is done by modeling KPIs in Excel. Similarly, data availability and analysis drive budget allocation, for example, allocation for LinkedIn advertising

  1. Helping Achieve Precise Segmentation & Targeting

The rise of omnichannel marketing is a clear indication that customers are more distributed than ever. The opportunities for reaching the target customer have increased, but so has the difficulty. Not to mention the competition. 

The fundamental questions of ‘who are we selling to’ and ‘how are we going to approach them’ are answerable only when the right data is present at the right time. Marketers have to use data to answer questions such as

  1. Who is our target audience?
  2. Where does our target audience lie / what channels do they consistently use/are exposed to? How many channels do we want to be present on?
  3. Based on our product, budget, and other influential factors such as logistical reach and size of workforce, what type of targeting should we adopt? Mass targeting, differentiated, niche, or microtargeting being some options
  4. What is the competition doing in the market? What parameters does he work on?

3. Helping Provide Personalized Offerings

Precise targeting also helps marketers create a database over time that they can use as a reference for providing personalized products, services and experiences to the customer. 

With consistent maintenance and upgradation, this database can serve as a pivotal point where the customer prefers your brand and your brand only. 

There has been ample research showing that customers are more satisfied, more likely to complete a purchase, and even willing to pay more when offered a personalized product/service as compared to a non-personalized one. The trend is only growing with Generation Z, who are more willing to share their personal details to receive personalized recommendations in return.

Leveraging both big and small data to achieve this is the way to create a lasting and authentic bond with customers.

How To Consolidate The Data Analysis Process

Our proposal is very simple: gather all of your present and incoming data under a single platform – Explorazor. Conduct queries on the integrated, standardized dataset, and you will receive instant data pivots. It’s a no hassle process that accelerates data analysis, empowering marketers with high-quality information and leaving them with so much more time on their hands to do stuff more productive than extracting insights from multiple datasets stored in different files. There’s so much more to it, like downloading of required data pivots as CSV files if needed, ability to drill-through and drill-across any metric of interest, customization options, and other features built especially for Brand & Sales Teams and Managers.

We encourage marketers to do more with their marketing strategies and campaigns by leaning more on data analysis than intuition and experience, and we encourage using Explorazor to expedite the process of extracting data pivots from data. 

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The Not-So-Subtle Relationship Between Branding & Sales

by adminin Brand Recognition, Brand Trust, Branding, Data Exploration, sales

Today we’ll be talking about branding’s impact on sales using some examples from the FMCG industry. The purpose of this article is to convey, in no uncertain terms, that companies need to pay attention to and hammer down their branding strategies right now. We’ll also be exploring how ease of data analysis can help make better branding and sales decisions – and a very simple and effective method of easing data analysis. Let’s begin:

Function of A Brand – Seth Godin

You might have heard of various definitions of ‘brand’, but one of the most complete definitions that I have come across is from Seth Godin. I quote “A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.” 

He further goes on to say “If the consumer (whether it’s a business, a buyer, a voter or a donor) doesn’t pay a premium, make a selection or spread the word, then no brand value exists for that customer”.

Why this quote is complete is because it outlines the benefits that companies get when they get their branding right –

  1. The consumer pays a premium to get your brand, simply by virtue of it being your brand
  2. The consumer at the very least chooses your brand over others, in the event of other factors, such as price, being the same
  3. The consumer herself begins actively engaging in promoting your brand via word-of-mouth

The right branding should get you sales and free promotion, per Seth Godin.

To get the branding right, one has to focus on branding in the first place.

Using Branding For Sales – Recognition & Trust! 

Now that the need for branding is established, let’s skim over the very first ingredients needed to get the branding underway. A foolproof method is to start off by building greater brand recognition and fostering brand trust. 

  1. Attention Grabber: Brand Recognition

The competition for grabbing the mental space of a consumer is always ON. Round-the-year branding, even though it may not seem to be the most impactful at times, readies the consumer for the moment-of-truth, when she is looking to make a purchase. Hardly a consumer knows the difference between Tide & Surf Excel, but almost every consumer buys on the basis of the perceived value they derive from the advertising campaigns of each brand. 

In other words, if they give first mental recognition to your brand when opting for a solution to their need, they are more likely to prefer your brand to others.

The right branding can even trump core value offered to consumer!

  1. Care & Nurture: Brand Trust

Brand trust is one of the biggest drivers of brand loyalty, repeat customer purchase decisions, and long-term customer satisfaction.

Case Study: HUL Star-Sellers

In around 1997, HUL wanted to set up distribution of basic necessities like oils, detergents, and soaps across all villages in India. Distribution was one thing; store acceptance was another. HUL identified local influencers in villages even with populations of less than 2000 people and used them as ‘faces’ of the brand to persuade retailers to stock their products and sell in the local markets. 

The branding was unconventional, but it hit the mark because HUL used the concept of brand trust as its base. 

You will find multiple other examples of HUL paying focused attention on creation of brand trust. Ventures like Project Shakti are another reason why HUL was able to not only create thousands of jobs and revenue for the company, but also forge a lasting impact on the masses that today holds HUL’s name synonymous with ‘trust’. 

From Cadbury to Pepsi…

Cadbury noted that the term ‘Eclairs’ was a commonly used term for a type of candy, and retailers were dishing out other brands in the name of ‘Eclairs’ instead of Cadbury’s well-known Eclairs. It undertook a product realignment campaign and renamed the product to ‘Chocolairs’.

Pepsi keeps changing its logos to keep up with trends, spending millions of dollars each time.

Tropicana’s package rebranding in 2009 for reasons similar to Pepsi’s, failed drastically, resulting in 20% year-on-year sales degrowth. As marketing professor and Ph.D. holder Mark Ritson noted, and we quote Brandstruck, the new design “achieved something Tropicana’s competitors had failed to in 20 years – a degradation of its brand equity and an undermining of its status as market leader.”    

There are hundreds of examples in the FMCG industry itself, of how brands spend time, effort, and money to brand and rebrand their well-established products.

Branding seems to be pretty important for all of these brands.

Is it for you?

An Important Sub-Component – Proper Data Analysis

Just like all the sub-components in a branding strategy pave the way for good branding, a company’s overall choices of people, processes and products combine to produce effective decisions that impact every facet of the company, including branding and sales. 

While we’re sure your choices of people and processes are most apt, we do have a proposal to add Explorazor to your product portfolio. 

Explorazor is a data exploration and analysis tool built to ease the daily tasks of Senior Managers in Brand & Sales Teams, who currently work on Excel. Explorazor does not replace Excel; we are interested in complementing Excel. You can also explore some ways Explorazor differs from Power BI.

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The Painful Process of Making a Data-Backed Decision

by adminin Brand Managers, decision-making, sales, Sales Managers

Let’s explore the decision-making process that a business user, say a Sales Manager or a Brand Manager, goes through. The aim would be to identify the challenges they face during this process and explore a very relevant solution for that.

We’ll do this step-wise:

  1. The challenge is presented

Either the business user is actively analyzing a piece of information, looking for solutions, or a challenge presents itself, which s/he starts solving. 

For example, he observes that Total Sales in Region X has shown degrowth.

  1. Possible reasons are explored

Identifying the problem is the first step toward formulating a solution. Total Sales has shown degrowth, the first question that is raised is ‘Why’. For that, the Sales manager will look at whether his primary and secondary sales targets are being achieved or not.  

The Brand Manager, or the Data Manager, as they are called in certain roles, will go a little further to investigate other aspects that might help arrive at the reasons for the degrowth.

Some of the other areas that will be scrutinized are:

a. Market Data

First off, one sees how the market is performing. If my brand is down by 2%, but the entire category is down by 4%, then there’s no real cause for worry. For example, sales of ice cream are bound to go down during the monsoon season. 

Market data would also include the tracking, measurement and evaluation of marketing spends. It also includes surveying competition’s activities and correlating it to the change in sales of our own brand. 

b. Efforts Data

Are my people meeting the wholesalers as they were doing previously? In the case of the pharmaceutical industry, medical representatives meet doctors and provide them with promotional material or, say, medications, and follow a similar course of action with chemists as well. Another sub-component of the Efforts data would be to see if the team is following previously successful strategies or not.

c. Consumer Insights & Brand Health 

Datasets like Kantar provide valuable insights into customer behavior and psyche, how they can be expected to react to a particular promotional strategy, etc. It shares concrete data like Average Trip Size of a customer in a particular store.

Long-term focus areas such brand health, which is quite similar to brand perception, will also be kept a tab on.

3. Proactive or corrective action is undertaken 

Once the reason is pinpointed, managers can then begin setting up and rolling out implementation strategies.  

But before they can do that..

THE ISSUE OF WORKING WITH MULTIPLE DATASETS

Notice that we described the multiple datasets that managers work on in quite some detail. 

This is to bring your focus to the issues concerning working on multiple datasets 

  1. At the very least, time is wasted 
  2. The communication to acquire such datasets is another challenge in itself
  3. Cleansing and merging the datasets is also a painstaking process

By the time the manager gets around to testing assumptions and conducting analysis, much of time has been wasted and the effort that should have gone into analysis and exploration is allocated just readying the dataset for analysis and exploration.

SOLVING THE ISSUE OF WORKING WITH MULTIPLE DATASETS

Explorazor is a data exploration and analysis tool that has been designed to specifically solve this issue for Brand & Sales teams. On Explorazor, managers see a single, integrated view of all their datasets which they can query using simple keywords and obtain data pivots in seconds. It literally puts all of the data under a single roof and makes it available at the fingertips of managers. All of the data would be stored on cloud, accessible via browser.

Of course, Explorazor is not entirely utopian; not every user will obtain access to all the datasets a company possesses. Rather, customized projects will provide access to all relevant datasets that a user needs for his daily, weekly or monthly activities.

For more details, you can visit the Explorazor website, and if you are interested in knowing more in detail, visit Explorazor docs.

  1. Preparing visualizations and presenting the decision

To reiterate, the first three steps in the decision-making process were:

  1. Looking for a piece of information, or a challenge being presented 
  2. Exploration of possible reasons, which includes analyzing multiple datasets
  3. Undertaking proactive or corrective actions

The findings are then finally translated into a narrative to be presented to the management and/or the team. As a manager, you know what’s best for your company, and the all-important task of communicating forward-looking insights impactfully is best left to you. Explorazor seeks to remove the load of tasks that senior managers should not spend, or dare we say, waste their time in. 

To speed up hypothesis testing, provide independence in ad-hoc analysis, and enable managers to spend more and more of their time on tasks that add value to their brands and companies is what Explorazor is built for. 

To understand Explorazor better, contact us at support@vphrase.com and we’ll set up a short Explorazor demo for you. If you can’t find the time for that, we’ll be happy to share a one-pager with you for your reading. Enjoy!

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