Experian upgrades Thai marketing

[Nick]

Business analytics as a service will help change the way marketing is done by offering more relevant, more targeted marketing programmes and a higher return on marketing investment as marketing functions change from being just advertising among companies in Thailand.


Sanjay Sachdev, vice-president for marketing services, South Asia, Experian.

In an exclusive interview, Sanjay Sachdev, vice-president for marketing services at Experian, said that today banks in Thailand are becoming more mature and are looking at acquiring world class solutions to manage risk better and do lots of targeted offers.

Experian is a household name in the UK and many other countries for its credit rating services for the consumer. However, for Thailand and the region, Sachdev heads a business unit that focuses on business analytics to do targeted marketing.

He said that the marketing industry in Thailand, from his point of view, is still in its infancy with very immature, non-targeted television, radio and even direct mail advertisements. Sachdev himself has stopped reading his Citibank offers as while he gets offers for lots of restaurants offering 50 percent off, he does not live in the Sathon area where all those restaurants are located.

Experian helps by working with lots of different customer databases, consolidating data from spreadsheets to databases and giving a single view of the customer, what he likes, where he lives, what he can afford, when and where he likes to go out and what brands he is interested in.

With this information, the company can give targeted, relevant promotions whether it is through SMS, email or even direct mail. The customer will be happier and spend more and at the end of the day, which is what matters for the marketing department.

The report can be as detailed as saying a person makes five business trips a year, three golfing trips a year and two trips a year to Phuket.

In Thailand, Experian does not own a customer database. Rather it works with customers to tap into the information they already have buried in their systems, combined with general demographic data. In other countries such as Singapore, it does have its own people database.

Surprisingly, Sachdev said that one of the biggest client segments for Experian aside from the usual suspects of banks and credit card companies are the mom-and-pop manufacturers. Thailand has a lot of old, strong manufacturing family companies now being handed over to a new generation educated in the US or UK. The younger generation want to become more professional and grow the company. One manufacturer he worked with used to sell only to five distributors. Now they sell direct to hundreds of retailers and gather much more information. Another, a T-shirt maker, has used Experian to help them go not just to retailers, but direct to their customers, rolling out loyalty programmes and using the information gathered for valuable feedback into product design.

Other bright spots include the automotive sector and the beverage companies.

Experian's service is different from that of usual Business Intelligence and data warehousing by offering relevant information to marketing via what it calls the marketing brain. Traditional BI is focused on business intelligence across business units and more on business performance rather than on marketing. "BI cannot answer the CMO's [Chief Marketing Officer] questions," he stated.

He similarly dismisses the need for a Data Warehouse, being happy to work with data from multiple sources such as spreadsheets. Sometimes all that is required in terms of an on-site upgrade is a simple 60,000 baht SQL database server which often surprises his clients who assume a huge database project rollout.

Experian offers the service on-demand on on-premise as is required. Most customers are happy to have the analysis sent over to its data centre in Hong Kong for processing.

Sachdev says that in Thailand there is a perception that marketing is advertisement. But targeted marketing can achieve much better returns on investment. Instead of taking five days for a generic email campaign with a one percent response rate, Experian is also providing templates and the marketing brain to turn that time into hours and get a 5 to 10 percent response rate.

And will we see Experian becoming a household name with everyone concerned about their credit history like is happening in the West? Sachdev admitted that in Thailand, credit history is still not as big a concern as it should be.

"We did meet with the head of the National Credit Bureau. He was very frustrated but his hands are tied. He wants to take it to the next level but with the regulation in Thailand, he cannot," he said.

The information in the Thailand Credit Bureau is outdated and not what the creditors want in order to make better decisions. Relevant information is simply not there, especially on the consumer side.

About the author


Writer: Don Sambandaraksa
Position: Database Reporte

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