As the southern hemisphere heads into summer and people flock to the beach it is

tempting to think that the GFC was a just bump in the road. In some ways it was
â at least for Australia. We seemed to have ducked the worst of the GFC. But that
perception ignores the major changes that the GFC has produced. One of these ch
anges concerns the way brands discover and talk to their markets. The GFC accele
rated the rise of social networking and decline in popularity of mass media to p
roduce a tectonic shift. This shift will have far reaching implications.
This new environment has enabled a quite different approach to growing markets a
nd winning market share. Technology has both facilitated the 'fracture' of marke
ts into special interest groups and provided the wherewithal to identify and com
municate with these groups â in real time. It's time to get granular!
Stop guessing and start knowing
Not many companies have been able to turn the massive amounts of data that socia
l networks create into profit. This is because they lack the ability or simply d
o not have the courage to make the steps necessary. In fact, the vast majority o
f companies have not managed to develop a management structure and marketing str
ategy that is in line with the fracturing of the market place they play in. Many
are still guessing their way through mass media insights and market research ba
sed on small sample sizes extrapolated out to the entire population.
This will change very quickly in the coming months. As Hal Varian, the chief eco
nomist of Google, recently stated in the McKinsey Quarterly, "I keep saying the
sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. People think Iâ m joking, but
who wouldâ ve guessed that computer engineers wouldâ ve been the sexy job of the 1990
s?".

Companies develop far better growth strategies if they choose to focus on granul
ar information â in both identifying and attacking new market segments and in cutt
ing costs.
The concept in practice
The Harvard Business Review recently explored the ramifications of exploring gra
nular data. In that article they discussed how Amazon leverages it's virtual and
low cost supply chain to "efficiently indulge the tastes of narrow customer seg
ments, literally down to the individual buyer, at very low marginal cost".
The article went on to discuss how the strongest contribution to performance com
es, not necessarily from focusing on acquiring overall market share, but identif
ying and investing in markets with the most vitality. The example they illustrat
ed was that of a construction and services business face near zero growth. The c
ompany used granular data to divide its world into geographic, customer and prod
uct segments. They quickly discovered that they had very weak market share in th
e fastest growing market spaces revealing over $10 billion in potential that cou
ld be tapped into.
Steps to take
So here is what you need to do:
Accept that a fundamental change in communication is taking place and be prepare
d to adapt
Allocate budget towards methods and technologies that can gather relevant data
Use this data to identify new market opportunities, the strongest growth areas w
ill be apparent quickly
Invest in these new segments and be prepared to ditch low growth market segments
, and
Develop a method for managing the multiple market segments you may now be playin
g in
Life's a beach
In the good times it's easy to be complacent as customers come to you easily â lik
e all of those people flocking to the beach this summer. But in the wintry phase
the world economy is currently going through understanding the needs and wants
of the micro-markets you can have most influence over is a winning strategy â it's
is easy to scale up when things begin to warm back up.
Now's the time to get out your microscope and look carefully at the grains of da
ta you have available to you.