Leveraging customer intelligence for a better consumer journey, feat. Alex LePage & Ganes Kesari

How can brands gather meaningful insights about customer behavior to improve decision making? Can we stitch together these insights across the customer journey? How does a brand have an authentic exchange of value with a consumer? In this episode of IBM thinkLeaders, we are joined by Alex LePage (Senior Product Marketing Director, Marketing Solutions at Neustar) and Ganes Kesari (Co-founder & Head of Analytics at Gramener). We talk to Alex and Ganes about whether a customer can have a seamless journey in an omnichannel world, the power of marketing teaming up with data science for cross-functional expertise, and how to turn a happy customer into a promoter for the brand. We also dig into the recently announced Dashboard act (regarding data monetization) and the fine line between creepy and useful with retargeting.

“[I]t's very important that brands look at what do customers value and how do you maintain the trust. Customers don't like people talking about their data behind their backs. So we will have to be conscious as to what a customer knows about, how the data is being used, and maintain the trust element.”-Ganes Kesari, Co-founder & Head of Analytics at Gramener

“A data scientist combined with a marketer or a social psychologist--that is the most powerful combination because they need to define what the hypothesis is and what the model is going to be deployed to help us.” -Alex LePage, Senior Product Marketing Director, Marketing Solutions at Neustar

Connect with thinkLeaders and our panelists:
@IBMthinkLeaders
@Neustar
@kesaritweets

BIOS

Alex LePage leads Product Marketing for Neustar. He is responsible for driving the positioning, go-to-market strategy and messaging for Neustar's full Marketing Intelligence Platform, including the MarketShare analytics suite, the Identity Data Management Platform (DMP), and the Customer Intelligence solution.

Previously, Mr. LePage held leadership positions in product strategy and product marketing at Rubicon Project and Chango, marketing at Toys R Us, and strategy and client revenue roles at iCrossing/Hearst and Wunderman/Y&R. With more than 20 years of experience, he is a sought-after speaker at the intersection of marketing, data and technology. Mr. LePage received a Master of Business Administration from Yale University and a Bachelor of Arts from Cornell University.

Ganes Kesari is the co-founder of Gramener, an organization that helps identify insights and convert them into stories. He’s played several startup leadership roles to scale Gramener, with a demonstrated ability to conceive strategy and execute on-the-ground.In his current role as head of Analytics, he has advised 100+ enterprises 1) to build their data science roadmap, 2) to execute projects that apply advanced analytics for business value and 3) to use data stories to drive business decisions. Ganes leads Gramener innovation efforts at AI Labs by experimenting with the latest developments in advanced analytics.

Ganes speaks regularly in business and technology events around the world, such as TEDx, O'Reilly Strata, O'Reilly AI Conf, Hubspot Inbound, AnacondaCON. He provides corporate training in Data science and has taught in courses run by institutes like ISB Hyderabad, IIIT, IIM, and NID.