The current economic landscape shows that a paradigm shift is taking place, assigning more power to the consumer and the control they have over their personal data. This is especially driven by technology which facilitates the interaction between people who hold the knowledge. It is only once order is created out of this free-floating data that knowledge becomes an asset for any organisation.
Due to this paradigm shift it is important for organisations to move towards a more granular approach of each customer; to understand their motives, needs and behavioural patterns and to apply one-to-one marketing.
This new knowledge economy, or ‘Intangible Assets’, is increasingly becoming part of organisations’ business strategies. It relies on the use of knowledge to produce economic benefits, looking at customer databases. Ultimately, knowledge management is a critical strategic tool which enables any organisation to function more effectively, to make informed decisions and to strengthen its competitive capabilities and success.
Knowledge 350° has been designed to assist organisations in this transformation; to provide insights to solid theoretical subject matter and to ensure that it is relevant, not only to the new knowledge economy but also the new data privacy initiatives like "POPI" (Protection of Personal Information Act). Ultimately, it is crucial for any organisation to stay ahead of its competitors and Knowledge 350° will assist in this regard.
Knowledge 350° is a 15 step business process which creates an integrated and logical strategic process that assists companies to build up meaningful databases in line with POPI and to move away from segmenting customers to building "single customer profiles" with detailed demographics and psychographics associated to each customer. This will assist companies in building consent-based data (POPI and CPA compliant) with in-depth knowledge (experiences, insights and inferences) so as to effectively monetise the knowledge in a partnership with the consumer.
The technology developed by the Group is used to facilitate the 15 steps and enable the "strategic objectives" to be executed with the deployment of the technology.
With mass marketing declining and one-to-one marketing increasing, there is an accelerated need to understand the customer better so as to communicate in a dialogue and not a monologue and to provide the customer with marketing material that is meaningful, relevant and anticipated.
Over the next few decades, the intelligent use of data (knowledge) will become one of the biggest competitive advantages a company can have.
However, collecting, processing and using this data to communicate will come with a number of challenges:
