🛢️ Data is the new Oil

Let's try to understand how effectively companies are using Data to target their customers.

🫵🏼 Companies Disguised?

Data Data Data - This is what you have been hearing from tech and non-tech companies that are growing at an exponential phase.

To set some context, what would you call Starbucks? A chain of coffeehouses operating in the F&B industry, right? But I would term Starbucks as a part of the banking industry. They don't sell coffee alone, but also they sell membership cards that allow you to load money to buy coffee, something similar to a bank right? Starbucks makes enormous money from the interest earned from the funds loaded in the wallet.

So what's the key takeaway from this? Every company works in a disguised fashion and earns profits apart from their main hustle.

Another case study is Amazon which is not just an E-commerce Retailer but has been effectively using data for its AWS business as well to grow its E-commerce platform.

🦸🏻‍♂️ Amazon's Superpower

To know more about Amazon's superpower, I would like to show you a smart oven - June Oven. So, this is basically an oven introduced in 2013 with all smart features like WiFi Connectivity, Recipe recommendations etc. In fact, it was funded by Amazon's Alexa fund and its sales skyrocketed from 2015-2019.

That's when Amazon launched its own smart oven and June started to face heavy competition from its own investor. How does Amazon do this? What superpower lever they pulled to become a competitor?

Essentially, Amazon have tons and tons of

• Customer Data

• Data of Seller

With this, Amazon exactly knows what type of buyers are buying an oven, in which region there is demand, what key features are customers looking for in an oven and what would be the optimal pricing. They can read through the customer's reviews and ratings, can pull data from what customers are searching in the search bar, can understand what products have huge order-return rates and arrive at valuable insights from these useful data.

Basically, they are well-positioned to design a go-to-market strategy with all the data they hold.

You should have definitely seen products tagged as 'Amazon Basics' when you search for a product. These are nothing but private labels from Amazon and in fact, Amazon ranks and gives more preferences to these products and that's why they are always seen at the top of the search results with good ratings and great reviews. Amazon again uses its Digital Real Estate power here.

🏠 Amazon knows your home

With not just reading your phone's data, Amazon now knows the layout of your entire home. In 2022, Amazon acquired iRobot Roomba for a whopping 1.7 billion dollars. So Roomba is apparently a vacuum robot that helps in cleaning and mopping your home by mapping the entire layout of your rooms, kitchen and hallway. (Check out the product here)

With this acquisition, Amazon can now successfully know the entire layout of your home and can exactly suggest its recommended home products very curated for you. This is called target marketing and clearly articulates how effectively Amazon has been using the data.

Check more about Amazon's Roomba here

A few other companies that energetically use customer data are - Uber, Zomato etc.

Uber suggests to its drivers which place has more customer demand and which area to select and what would be the prime time to maximise their profits. Zomato, similarly, uses data to analyse which areas have more demand and what type of foods are ordered the most etc.

Every compnay in the near future would be either a Tech company or a Tech-enabled company.

These are just the tip of the iceberg insights that these companies use to understand their customers.

👮🏼‍♀️ Not just companies...

My argument is that it's completely fine that companies take to leverage the customer's data to suggest products through curated offerings but at the same time, firms should take into consideration the fact that some customers are very sensitive to their privacy and data.

Also, it's not just companies that track your data, even the Governments and Police spy to maintain order and decorum. Watch the Snowden movie which is based on true events and the movie clearly explains how the CIA pulls data not just from their enemies but also they track data from their own citizens. Terrorism was just an excuse for them. This is about economic and social control. Forget about the old colonisation tricks that the diplomats used to follow. The trend has now changed. Do you know what colonisation is happening now? Economic colonisation and the more dangerous one - Data Colonisation.

Now shifting gears, there is a new emerging oil in the market - the Microchip and the Semiconductors. The cold war on microchips has already begun between US and China.