Predictive analytics a future driver for business growth

Predictive analytics is a vital component for businesses looking to stay ahead of their competition and scale efficiently while minimising risk, said Daniel Shearly, VP of Products, GfK, a leading provider of consumer and market intelligence, analytics, and consulting services, headquartered in Nuremberg, Germany.

What is predictive analytics? “It is a branch of advanced analytics that makes predictions about future outcomes using historical data combined with statistical modelling, data mining techniques and machine learning”, according to IBM.

So will the adoption of predictive analytics helps businesses to spot potential threats or opportunities? Organisations need to respond to market fluctuations, emerging opportunities, and threats faster than ever before. To be on the front foot here they need to have the ability to spot market changes before they happen. Having these actionable predictive insights on hand, weeks or even months before human-led research would materialise, allows businesses to quickly unlock important details that can deliver a major impact. Businesses that are succeeding in today’s difficult climate have made bold changes, not minor adjustments, inform Shearly.

“When Covid first hit globally, our clients wanted to know how it would impact them. They needed to understand the impact on sales and buying behaviours to ensure they could manage stock, and their supply chain and even change marketing, sales, and distribution strategies. Our forecasting feature in gfkpredict helped our clients understand how to react to the changing market and buying behaviours,” he said.

In the second half of 2022,  GfK will continue to support clients across the consumer product industry in geographies with significant growth potentials like Saudi Arabia, UAE, Iraq, and Pakistan.

“We are committed to delivering growth with data-driven intelligence by offering access to critical knowledge in real-time powered by gfknewron providing our clients with the information they need to understand what’s going on in their market and how to respond to it. We are also going to host an exclusive Insight Summit in Dubai next week for our clients and partners, focusing on winning in the rapidly evolving consumer landscape,” said Shearly.

Future driver

The use of predictive analytics in business today remains fragmented for many reasons: the sheer quantity and quality of data needed, the high level of technology investment and skill required, and the fact you need a leap of faith to believe a calculated algorithmic or AI-based insight. Despite these challenges, it is the problems that predictive analytics addresses and solves that will drive its adoption. For businesses, it serves as a guide to identifying future risks and opportunities providing meaningful trusted insights to support the most critical decisions.

GfK helps companies with strategic decision support, planning, and forecasts – all within one software platform to study the trends across time and geography and the global retail landscape. “We help businesses to stay agile and competitive by giving the intelligence they need to move at speed powered by an always-on intelligence platform, gfknewron, that enables brands to reduce 30 per cent of time spent on root cause analysis, understand brand uplift in just seconds or plan a promotion with just two clicks,” concluded Shearly. — sandhya@khaleejtimes.com

• Dubai