The Indian Crab Syndrome

Can data sharing help companies compete with Jio/Facebook data elephant!

There is no question that Jio is the elephant in the Indian room. Facebook’s $5.7 billion in Jio Platforms was rapidly followed by another 12 investments in rapid succession, adding up to over $20 billion. The world's major technology companies valued Jio at over $65 billion. Research firm CLSA extrapolated Jio Platforms’ valuation forward to $103 billion by March 2022.

Here is an ambitious look at how Jio wants to impact Indian society.

Technology companies, from Jio,Uber, Google to Facebook, hold growing stores of data about user behavior. This data has become a source of huge competitive advantage for them. Jio now leads the pack in the Indian market.

Today the data size that these companies own has become so large that government officials and academics want access to it.

Facebook says this about the Jio deal “There is no data sharing in this deal. I think as Facebook, we continue to believe in an open ecosystem for data. And that continues to be our point of view.”

Do we believe that, or are we seeing the creation of the largest Customer Data monopoly!

How do you fight these Data elephants? Can companies share data to compete with Jio, Facebook & Google? Can companies build a “data moat” by inviting like-minded & complementary businesses to join together in a Marketing bureau? Would non-competing brands like Shoppers Stop, HDFC bank Tata Sky & TVS auto come together to share data! Is such a data co-op possible? Technology is available-would Microsoft Azure or AWS enable this with Airtel maybe? Shared data can fill in the blanks to build a complete customer profile!  Will marketers align together or will multiple program partner interests be too complex to manage? Or will Indian crab syndrome come in the way!

It is said that Indian crabs if left in a basket, are never able to escape. Each time one crab tries to get out of the basket another one would pull him down!

We have all heard of Herbivores & Carnivores but there is a new breed in town-the Datavores! Companies who are born in the digital age & have created advanced ecosystems to digest, use & monetize data!

Another way to build a “data moat” is to invite like-minded & complementary businesses to join together in a Marketing bureau. Data sharing to compete with Amazon, Facebook & Google would be a necessary strategy in the years to come.

Would non-competing brands like Shoppers Stop, HDFC bank & TVS auto come together to share data! Is such a data co-op possible? Can pooling data be the solution for brands to fight Google, Facebook & Amazon? Shared data can fill in the blanks to build a complete customer profile!

Data value increases when it's shared. Sharing data allows marketers to better understand who their best customers are, which consumers they should market to, and with what specific offers. More importantly, data partnerships can hugely improve the customer experience.

Uber has made its API generally available to any developers who want to find exciting ways to embed the service into their apps. That means any app that can send a destination address to Uber will be able to display pickup times and fare estimates without users having to leave their apps.

Legacy companies have to change their mindsets to allow such initiatives to flower. Companies need to be getting more senior people within Marketing or as a separate function to own the process of improving customer experience through smart partnerships. This can open new channels, streamline customer processes & create innovative new products or services.

Catalog retailers have long shared their mailing lists with other retailers to reach a wider audience. Moreover, financial companies have combatted fraud by pooling their data into Credit Bureaus.

With the growth in programmatic advertising, there are specific categories of marketers with rich first-party data, like retail, travel, and financial services, but many big marketing spenders don't have such resources. For them, collaboration with publishers and other marketers rich with first-party data is mutually beneficial and drives the success of more sophisticated one to one marketing initiatives. Most marketers have been using walled gardens like Facebook & Google to access new customers & also to learn more about their customers due to the enormous pool of cross-device consumer log-in data. Marketers are now realizing a fundamental limitation with Facebook, as they put in their data to reach customers but do not get it back to build their own customer profiles and create a truly universal view of the customer journey.

That is why we are seeing so much more second-party data. Second-party data is another company's first-party data that is strategically shared with your brand, in exchange for some of your own first-party data. This is how smart marketers are getting more scale for addressable advertising without losing sight of the whole customer journey in the process.

The world is changing in one significant way-some companies are willing to share information & have started to access data that is available publicly. Open data—public information and pooled data from private sources—can help create $3 trillion a year of value according to McKinsey.

They share data through APIs. There are over 16,784 APIs offered by firms today, according to programmableweb.com. APIs allow different software applications to communicate with each other and exchange data directly, without the need for any human interaction. APIs are now the de facto standard for sharing data and have enabled organizations that hold large amounts of data to become platforms for third-party innovation.

Twillio, for instance, provides a service that allows partners to send and receive voice and SMS communications.18 When a customer gets an SMS message telling them that their Uber driver has arrived, this is powered by the Twilio API.

So, new-age companies use partnerships through APIs very effectively. Uber uses Google Maps, Twilio (SMS notifications), SendGrid (e-mails), and Braintree (payments) to make the magic happen. Airbnb, too, uses SendGrid, Twilio, and Braintree. Uber allows itself to be embedded into the Open Table and United Airlines apps. The OpenTable app has a 'Ride With Uber' feature, making it easy to book an Uber ride with a single click within the OpenTable app.

You don't see legacy companies doing this - HUL sharing APIs with Philips or Saffola sharing APIs with FitBit? Alternatively, HDFC Bank sharing APIs with the Future Group?

The algorithmic and API-based business will be the business of the future, and it will change marketing as we know it.

Also, today Marketers have access to a lot of external data. How they mash this up creatively with their own data & produce features that are of value to consumers is going to become very important in the days to come.

Can pooling data be the solution for brands to fight Jio, Google, Facebook & Amazon? The shared economy of data lets owners capitalize on the first-party data they are already collecting. First-party data can be gathered from a marketer's site traffic, CRM database, or customer purchase history.

A major impact on business models for data partnerships will be the use of blockchain and bitcoin.  These technologies will open the opportunity to create global partnerships that connect buyers and sellers of data in a massive and secure data ecosystem. A major impact on business models for data partnerships will be the use of blockchain and bitcoin.  Blockchains create trust by acting as a shared database, distributed across vast peer-to-peer networks that have no single point of failure and no single source of truth, implying that no individual entity can own a blockchain network, and no single entity can modify the data stored on it unilaterally without the consensus of its peers.

CEO’s need to watch this space & drive data partnerships to create unique new ways to grow their company operating models with the customer at its center.