HarperCollins uses a knowledge-driven technique to make quicker, bolder marketing decisions.
Why do book readers choose specific titles? Favor certain authors? Shop at select retailers? Consumer research data often contains these pearls of wisdom, but finding them in a quick-changing publishing landscape can prove a frightening task to old-school booksellers.
HarperCollins Publishers, which have been around in various incarnations for greater than 200 years and is likely one of the world’s largest publishing companies, found itself facing this problem. Previous to 2013, its staff couldn’t directly access consumer-research data — a first-rate weakness in an era where tablets, e-readers, and other mobile devices are dramatically changing the manner readers experience the written word.
The company decided to refocus its marketing strategies. It needed faster, data-driven insights to customise sales and pricing plans for its books and authors. Doing so, however, might disrupt the venerable publishing firm’s traditional ways of doing things, specifically those in line with generations of expertise in place of on cold, hard data.
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“Within the old world, we had a superb idea for our authors as to who their target market was,” said David Boyle, SVP of consumer insight at HarperCollins, in a phone interview with InformationWeek. “That was definitely the old way of working — 200 years of history.”
But rapid changes in publishing called for brand spanking new solutions. “Maybe there have been audiences that we totally forgot, or didn’t realize were appropriate,” Boyle added.
The solution was to construct a cloud-based business intelligence (BI) solution that might allow HarperCollins’ global workforce to quickly access to the company’s own consumer research. After evaluating cloud-based providers, the publisher chose Adatis, an information management company and Microsoft BI partner, to aid design and host its system.
Using Microsoft SQL Server 2013 Enterprise software and a Windows Azure virtual machine with eight 1.6-GHz CPUs and 16 GB of memory, Adatis built a cloud-based data warehouse for HarperCollins. The answer included an FTP site at the virtual machine where researchers post data, consistent with a Microsoft case study.
The cloud-based approach enabled HarperCollins to get its BI solution up and running in only two weeks. The system automatically feeds data from GMI, HarperCollins’ research agency, into the cloud setup a week. Six standard reports (created by HarperCollins and Adatis staff) filter data in accordance with one in every of six topics. Graphs display consumers’ interest in report topics, which include the appeal of a specific book, in addition the consumers’ ages, media-consumption habits, and where they shop.
One key to getting publishing veterans, a few of whom will not be enamored of an information-driven technique to marketing, is to develop visualizations in an interesting way, in keeping with Boyle. “We didn’t just put information in front of them that was interesting. We put information in front of them that way relevant to the verdict they were making,” he explained.
Reports, for example, are effective for quickly revealing consumer trends that let a publisher to make bolder marketing decisions, Boyle said. If readers between the ages of 17 and 24 are showing more interest in a book originally targeted at a younger, teenage crowd, HarperCollins can swiftly alter its campaign to succeed in the suitable audience.
The publishing industry could be old, but HarperCollins’ BI solution means that even a mature business can get pleasure from a knowledge-friendly focus. “What we’re really enthusiastic about is that we’re driving using data through those who find themselves not used to using data of their day-to-day lives,” said Boyle of HarperCollins’ staff. “And that makes it 100 times more powerful.”
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