India is adding around six million new entrants every month to its internet user base and is a huge market for both retail and internet industries. E-commerce players are likely to hit saturation levels on new customers. Opening physical stores would become a trend to address the twin challenge of saturation and marketing costs. The next big thing is the Virtual Reality. The way we shop will be easier because consumers will interact with AI chats bots and Unified Payment Interface (UPI) will simplify transaction. Read more at:https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/288440

A recent report by EMarketer states that 1.4billion people interacted with chatbot in 2015.So, chatbots have huge opportunities for future marketing and some effective uses of chatbots are: 1. Sell a product or service, 2. Make payments easier, 3. Gain customer insight, 4. Personalize marketing, 5. Increase Engagement, 6. Qualify your Leads. Read more at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/sujanpatel/2017/01/21/6-effective-uses-for-chatbots-in-marketing/#7afe2f0f3f48

A chatbot or talkbot is a computer program which conducts a conversation via auditory or textual methods. The service could be ranging from functional to fun, and it could live in any chat products like Facebook Messenger,Text Messages, etc. There are two types of chatbots,

1.Chatbot that functions based on rules and  2. Chatbot that functions using machine learning or AI.  Chatbots  are  gaining popularity  as people are using messenger apps more than they are using social networks. To know more about chatbots, read: https://chatbotsmagazine.com/the-complete-beginner-s-guide-to-chatbots-8280b7b906ca

After acquiring a customer, the goal of a company is consumer retention through various techniques, namely customer value maximization which would maximize the revenue for the company. Their main aim should be to increase the length of time period they remain loyal to business, frequency of transactions and monetary value of transactions. Maximum value is thus the product of all three. Main characteristics of customer value maximization are customer segmentation, predicting consumer behavior instead of just looking historical data, looking at customer lifetime value and dynamic segmentation. The marketer should know what actions to take on what customers at the right time. Read more at: http://www.optimove.com/blog/maximize-customer-value-smart-way 

Even if investment is carefully performed, it still has chances of losing money. Some risks & it’s mitigation are: i) Basing Calculations on the Wrong Numbers, i.e. the trades should be carefully placed. ii) Overlooking Extraordinary Gains or Losses: Close judgment and critical thinking is required. iii) Ignoring the Error in Financial Ratio analysis: defining the terms carefully is important. iv) Overpaying:  Overpaying for Investments should be avoided. v)  Not Diversifying: Diversifying risk in stocks is necessary. vi) Basing Investment Decisions on Fraudulent Accounting Statements. vii)  Selling at the wrong time:  The ideal time to sell the stock is when shares are overpriced relative to the company's intrinsic value. Read more at: http://value-picks.blogspot.in/2017/05/managing-risks-in-value-investing.html

Economics is encountered in everyday by us. Product team can get benefited in attempt to build a good product if they keep in mind some principles and economics theories. i) Trade-off by product team for retaining a potential product feature may end up because of negative reviews by users. ii) Release changes have opportunity costs attached to them. iii) Since users respond to incentives, product team should contain gamification in checklist, iv) Behavioral economics can be useful to figure out the areas where users are struggling with respect to product. v) There should be minimum information asymmetry to drive positive user experience vi) Game theory can be helpful in decision making to improve market strategies. Read more at: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/295741

When Consumers look at brand, they expect to see true features and promises. According to research from CMO council, 23% respondent say false and misleading brand advertisement bothers most, 22% respondent gets bothered by pop-up ads, 17% gets bothered by auto-playing video ads (digital advertising). In this way, the negative advertising experience makes them feel differently about a brand or choose not to do business with the brand. Also, alongside interesting content, irrelevant ads put impact positively irrespective of the brand but poorly conceived and insulting ads put negative impact. Read more at: https://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2017/32275/what-bothers-consumers-most-about-brand-marketing

With increasing competition, a few ways to become a better marketer are suggested. First, along with authenticity and high personalization, adapting to customers' changing needs is very important. Companies need to impress customers buy their products so that they are willing to advocate. It is necessary to collaborate on defining the same shared target audience for an equal improvement in sales and marketing. Also, marketers need to have knowledge about every customer's lifestyle, their choices, and thus analyze how the company can make profit from them. These will help companies sell products according to customer needs and help them shift to outcome-based marketing, thus generating more profit. Read more at: https://blog.insideview.com/2017/04/28/3-marketing-nation-summit-takeaways-to-make-you-a-modern-day-marketer/

An earlier group of advertisers targeted Newspapers and TV, but now they have moved into social media. So, money is flowing to social. Spending on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook marketing continue to accelerate as mobile adoption and time spent on internet increases. In this manner, in the coming years Internet ad will surpass television. The shift to mobile and increased time spent with digital is having a major impact on social platforms. More people are engaging with brands on social. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is social now. Even the news is on social now. You can read fastest news on Twitter than on any other websites. Researches show that the consumers who include social media as part of their shopping process are four times more likely to spend more money on purchases. Most of the audience is on social. So, many marketers who've been using social for at least two years say it helped them improve sales. Read more at: http://www.business2community.com/social-media/smart-money-moving-social-01863316#LvrcWTpZ5JmxR8qb.97

For new Business, it's a challenge to get customers. So, one should incorporate new ideas for marketing. The Internet has widened the option to more affordable and easier option of marketing strategies. Social media like Facebook and Instagram can be used to make the brand viral. Meeting new customers at events or starting a blog may help. Facebook ads can be used to reach out to the customers. Building email funnels, renting a festival booth and attracting customers by giving freebies, volunteering under the brand name, giving samples to product critics can be useful. It can become an effective way to refine or reinvent the product. Offering workshops, posting a video review of the product, running viral contests, building a product page website, sending out press releases are some useful ways to attract customers. Read more at: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/294265

The present business environment is volatile and full of uncertainties. Therefore, a need arises to improve efficiency and profitability. Though many organizations rely on traditional techniques, predictive analytics is the new trend of managing risks and monitoring frauds which eliminates all the guesswork. Predictive analytics help us in reaching the source of fraudulent transactions and in dealing with future plausible attacks. Lack of corporate transparency and missing public trust should be dealt with by using advanced tools for managing huge data and ensuring accountability. Predictive analytics helps in building the customer profile to know his credibility which is useful for banks. Read more at : https://blogs.metricstream.com/ready-predictive-analytics-revolution/

In this blog, the author explains the steps to a dual risk rating system. In such a system, the probability of default (PD) is estimated separately from the loss given default (LGD). The expected loss for a given loan is then calculated as their product. Five essential steps to a dual risk rating system are: Understanding the key drivers of a dual risk system; Demonstrating the advantages of a dual risk rating approach through case studies; Implementing separate PD and LGD credit scoring solutions; Developing a PD and LGD mapping scale; and lastly Combining dual rating scores. Read more at : http://marketintelligence.spglobal.com/blog/risk-insight-five-essential-steps-to-a-dual-risk-rating-system

A Risk Analyst frequently comes across companies with incomplete financial information which is essential for their credit assessment. To solve this problem a dual approach that takes into account both the quantity and materiality of the exposures is useful: a) When there is a large number of small exposures, it is reasonable to fill gaps by leveraging company credit score benchmarks or looking at the Country Risk Scores and Industry Risk Scores that capture the risk of doing business in a country/industry.b) When there are large exposures,  we need to employ advanced statistical techniques, tailored to the company type, industry, and region, to estimate missing financial ratios needed in our fundamentals-based models, and thus generate a credit risk score.Read more at: http://marketintelligence.spglobal.com/blog/when-enough-is-enough-assessing-credit-risk-of-companies-with-incomplete-financials

Google Attribution 360 is the updated version of Google Attribution, an extremely useful app for Marketers. It helps you understand whether your marketing is working, turn audience insights into action, and deliver more relevant customer experiences. Salient features: Fast setup, Flexible data, Measures TV, Easy to take action, works across channels and across devices. Attribution 360 is also designed to be highly customizable and can measure ads from DoubleClick Campaign Manager. Read more at https://analytics.googleblog.com/2017/05/solving-enterprise-attribution-challenge.html?m=1

Given the power of the consumers, their demands and the most extreme competitions in the market every business is fighting to survive. Recently the businesses have invested mostly in digital transformation. Since data play a very important role, retail businesses are using the following trends to analyze those data. Firstly, retailers are considering data from in-store technologies and analyzing them to measure their effect on consumer's decisions and thus providing the products demanded more by customers.  Secondly, by location analytics, geo-targeted push notifications are sent out to customers and products are arranged more effectively in the stores.  Thirdly, with the help of explanatory analytics and predictive analytics more demanded products are stocked up. And lastly, cross-platform analytics helps retailers understand the customer's demands and provide effective support to them. Therefore, we can say that data analytics are an essential part of growth. Read more at: http://www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/top-data-analytics-trends-for-reatilers-of-2017

Apps are expected to produce $77 billion in revenue for business this year. Out of available 2.8 million apps, only a fraction is ever used. It means that the only cool idea is not enough for an app to be wanted by people, the app should add worth to users and be regular with the usefulness that the brand provides. Three steps can be taken to ensure that the subscription adds value and align with your business goals. First is to link up with values by defining the core values one provides as a company. Second is to exploit the tools like tap into features and functionality that mobile delivers to help push core value out into the world. And lastly by using mobile to supplement the brand's value, i.e. design the app around addressing a specific customer pain point that the speed and ease of mobile can help remove. Read more at: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/295511

Right data insights now have the potential to be a valuable resource to a marketer. It helps brand observe consumers, provide seamless brand experiences, etc. Goals of data driven marketing are: Real time personalization, App-based marketing, Location-based Marketing, Virtual assistants, Using Big Data to predict trends. So, ultimately its goal is to understand and target the suitable audiences. Most marketers have realized the need to be data driven. But to be successful they must choose their own internal data sets and apart from that utilize third party data to gain an in-depth view of consumers across the customer journey. Social Media Data, mobile data and DMPs provides deeper insights into customer's preferences. Read more at: http://www.business2community.com/big-data/state-data-driven-marketing-use-data-fuel-new-revenue-streams-01856921#RcsPHSImrRGOfL8c.972

The product, service or program one offers is to help or reach out to the people who needs. So, choosing the platform wisely to reach out to the audience is important. One should be different in advertising or delivering promises. If one's marketing isn't different he will simply compete on price and compromise on quality thus starting a downfall. Instagram offers value in one's Instagram bio telling others why they should like the page and how will they be benefited. Using the power of hashtag, making sure that the posts and ads is about target audience, interacting with followers and convincing audience how one’s product can be beneficial is important. Following all of these will help one be the leader of the marketplace. Read more at: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/293713

Big data and analytics projects will be managed by individual departments when the analytics solution at hand concern to a specific function that department does. The analytics solution is required to answer key questions that about the business, whether it is struggling with in a particular area of expertise or not. This makes the owning department the most logical area to start the search for an analytics solution. Some good practices can be: i) develop a compelling business case for the application ii) Get support for the project. iii) don't let IT run the project iv) Trial the new application v) Perform due diligence vi) Develop a roadmap vii) Don't let the technology take over viii) Create a super user ix) Always attempt for a "quiet" system. Read more at: http://www.techrepublic.com/article/10-tips-for-running-a-successful-analytics-project-outside-of-it/

There are many challenges that are faced by marketing executives as well as compliance leaders in emerging markets with increased corruption and risks. Each country has unique sets of market opportunities and risks and cannot be transferable to separate market. Markets are also dynamic and applying the same outdated models might give inappropriate results. Strategic intelligence is the need of the hour, with updated market intelligence and multiple data sets. This updated market information would account for changing market conditions.There should be a right mixture of centralized and remote market intelligence and MNC's should extract information from various sources. Finally, there should be a mutual collaboration and sharing of responsibility between compliance and market intelligence leaders. Read more at : https://blogs.metricstream.com/can-marketing-compliance-share-playbook/