12 minute read
Cybersecurity
COMMENT
Daniel Markuson, cybersecurity expert at NordVPN
Track and tell...
Your apps know where you were last night, and they don’t keep it secret
While GPS (global positioning system) or locationtracking technology can be helpful in your everyday life, especially while navigating through the streets of a new city – it can also put your privacy at risk. Apps can track your whereabouts without your consent and sell your data to third parties.
HOW DOES LOCATION TRACKING THREATEN YOUR PRIVACY?
Users are often unaware of the privacy implications of some permissions they grant to apps, especially when it comes to location-tracking information. Privacy policies are often vague, highlighting the need for location data and not disclosing that the same data can be shared and sold. When GPS is on, various organisations can easily track someone’s movements and use this information to collect data on their habits and (dis)likes and target them with advertising based on their location. Once a person’s location data has been collected from an app, and entered into the data marketplace, it can be sold over and over again, from the data providers to an aggregator that resells your data. In fact, location-targeted advertising reached $62.35bn in 2019, and it is expected to grow in the upcoming years.
WHY IS YOUR LOCATION BEING TRACKED?
Location details improve the user experience, helping companies produce more relevant content.
However, that convenience comes with the price, such as an uptick in targeted ads, an increased digital footprint, and a surged risk of data breaches.
You might have noticed that your Facebook ads often correspond with your location and recent internet activity. That’s the same social network that experienced a data leak of 533 million users’ data, including their location, last year. Our data is never safe, even in the hands of tech giants.
HOW TO GET RID OF LOCATION TRACKING
First, check which apps and software are allowed to track your location. Some apps need your location to do their job. For example, it would make no sense to use Google Maps without giving it location tracking permission. However, other apps collect your location as surplus data. Check the settings for each app on your phone to ensure that the location tracking is turned off on the apps not dependent on the location.
Secondly, turn your cookies off and/or clear them regularly. Tracking cookies are used to find out your IP address and geographical location. A good idea is to get rid of the habit to click accept all without actually reviewing what you are agreeing with.
COMMENT
The rise and rise of food prices
Increasing food costs have pushed infl ation higher and remain a pain point for both food and beverage companies and consumers
The beginning of 2022 kicked o with an inevitable fact that all nations are experiencing — rising inflation rates. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the Food Price Index for global food commodity prices marked 29.8 per cent higher in April than at the same time last year. Higher cost of living trends is prevalent in both developed and emerging economies, and they are refl ected in higher food prices globally. The rise in energy and food prices is to blame for the 9.2 per cent annual infl ation rate worldwide.
FACTORS AFFECTING FOOD AND BEVERAGE RATE HIKES
Numerous factors have led to the surge in food prices. Over the past couple of years, the dip in food production could not be matched with the increase in demand. Additionally, the Covid-19 pandemic and geopolitical situations have impacted global food markets.
FAO’s Food Price Index increased by 55.2 per cent between May 2020 and February this year, driven by a 159.4 per cent increase in the cost of cooking oils, which was followed by signifi cant price increases for staples such as sugar, dairy and grains respectively.
Manhal Naser, CEO, AWJ Investments
Let’s explore some of the factors that contributed to this situation:
Firstly, extreme weather conditions accounted for droughts in countries such as the Western US, South America, Brazil, Europe and Russia. This impacted an infl ux in cost for commodities such as oats, wheat, sugar, corn, soybeans, co ee and livestock.
Secondly, the pandemic brought about cross-boundary restrictions which impacted freight operations and resulted in higher costs, while an increase in fuel prices has made things even worse. Concerns regarding food availability caused cropproducing countries to impose export restrictions which further affected developing nations that heavily rely on imports for their food commodities.
Lastly, the Russia-Ukraine crisis has undoubtedly brought about shockwaves throughout the globe. Ukraine produces more than 25 per cent of the world’s sunfl ower seeds and accounts for 10 per cent of global wheat exports. As a result, sunflower oil and its alternatives are witnessing a sharp hike in prices. Although food and transportation costs have risen, the conflict has also contributed to an increase in the cost of food production.
Instability in the food markets has caused many governments to adopt food protectionism, whereby they impose taxes or a ban on exports of several staple commodities such as grains, cooking oil and pulses, thus impacting import-dependent countries.
IMPACT ON UAE FOOD AND BEVERAGE INDUSTRY
Data from the UAE’s National Bureau of Statistics show that the annual infl ation increased to 2.58 per cent in November 2021, from 1.86 per cent in the previous month.
According to Emirates NBD’s report, consumer infl ation rose to 4.6 per cent in April 2022, when compared on a yearon-year basis. While the chief driver of inflation has been transportation costs (28.8 per cent), food prices (8.6 per cent) have been the second largest factor driving infl ation in April this year.
Food and beverage (F&B) businesses have been facing major challenges with surging raw material and ingredient costs. Fitch Solutions reports an upward food price
WHILE THE ISSUE IS LARGELY GLOBAL AND NOT ONLY REGIONAL, THE SOLUTION CANNOT BE ATTAINED BY A SINGLE NATION OR REGULATORY BODY, BUT IN FACT, REQUIRES THE ATTENTION AND EFFORTS OF ECONOMISTS OF ALL NATIONS AT A GLOBAL LEVEL
infl ation in the UAE and the risk team forecasts the consumer price infl ation to average 3.5 per cent in 2022 compared to 0.2 per cent in 2021. In addition to that, price increases have extended to other parts of the supply chain.
Components such as packaging with aluminium, plastic wrap and cardboard materials, logistics with increased freight charges and trade restrictions, and ultimately the cost of the fi nished product itself. This has made it di cult for F&B companies to maintain a competitive edge and gain sustainable margins. As a result, companies that can’t absorb the rising costs have no option other than to raise product prices, further burdening the consumers.
The rise in cost is causing F&B manufacturers to review various elements of their businesses, including their product mix, supply chain and marketing strategies to cut costs. Several businesses are looking into investing in new product development and product innovation, sourcing sustainable packaging materials and renewable energy solutions.
Many F&B businesses, including brands that fall under the AWJ Investments umbrella, have been sourcing alternatives for raw materials, increasing their carrying levels of stock to maintain cost. They have also looked at re-engineering recipes to use alternative ingredients in place of expensive or hard-to-fi nd products while maintaining quality standards, all in an e ort to compensate for the price increase and to avoid passing this on to customers.
Furthermore, the UAE Ministry of Economy has taken tremendous measures to counter the rise in prices by imposing price caps on several thousand food items. Additionally, the UAE is encouraging startups and entrepreneurs to provide suggestions and solutions to food security challenges.
Contrary to certain developed countries, experts believe the UAE’s measures and practices are resilient and can withstand the shock to keep the economy stabilised. While the issue is largely global and not only regional, the solution cannot be attained by a single nation or regulatory body, but in fact, requires the attention and e orts of economists of all nations at a global level.
Kunal Badiani, regional head, MoEngage – Middle East, Africa and Turkey
Driving customer engagement with actionable insights
The what, why, how and when of it explained
Marketers who undermine the importance of actionable insights to understand customer behaviour are totally adri t. In the digital world, to build an impactful engagement strategy and provide a great customer experience, the fi rst lesson to be learned is that data, information and insights are not synonymous.
It’s true that brands and marketers, for a very long time, utilised data points from various sources to provide a personalised experience. But they realised
that campaigns driven by just data leads to superficial engagement and customer attrition. So, building actionable insights is indeed the missing link in the puzzle.
WHY ARE INSIGHTS IMPORTANT?
Marketers have to shift to an insights-led customer engagement platform to stay relevant and create hyper-personalised experiences.
Changes in customer behaviour and adoption of new trends like the exponential growth of digital interaction have made it compulsory for marketers to devise different engagement strategies. Once viewed as a luxury or an add-on, online engagement has transformed into a musthave element in marketing. Brands have to draw insights from various forms of data which their current tech stack cannot offer as it is restrictive.
In the Middle East, the issue is more significant as digital adoption is growing exponentially. There is a huge shift in customer preferences and buying behaviour with almost 67 per cent of customers having moved to digital channels to engage with brands. Therefore, marketers now have to design different and ramp up their engagement strategies to give customers an omnichannel experience. A recent report by MoEngage shows that 38.7 per cent of marketers have identified real-time analytics as their top customer engagement challenge. The good news is that brands, armed with increased usage of smartphones, social media, and web platforms, possess a goldmine of data. It’s just a matter of taking the right steps to analyse and convert these various data points into insights and craft bespoke customer engagement strategies that can deliver results.
The traditional method of capturing historical data to analyse and predict customer behaviour and explore affinity belongs to a bygone era. It’s time to drive in an insights-led engagement and create a ‘segment-of-one’.
WHAT ARE THE INSIGHTS SAYING? Gap in data leading to disjointed experience for customers
Our findings show that the current customer engagement tech stack most marketers
use comprises customer relationship management (CRM) or customer data platforms (CDPs), and a multichannel customer engagement platform (CEP). This poses a huge challenge for them in terms of getting real-time analytics and understanding which channels are most effective to communicate with customers. In this scenario teams operate in siloes and consumers face broken experiences. Only a smart CEP can eliminate these disjointed experiences and help them tide over volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment (VUCA).
Focusing on the right insights is important
Our research shows that only about 14 per cent of the brands deep-dive into important aspects of customer insights like preferred channels, the probability to purchase, churn or hibernate, and segment personas. This missing critical information can personalise communication, but has remained the most underutilised element. On the other hand, about 34 per cent of marketers in the Middle East personalise communication based on alternate and data from customer attributes like language, channel, and content affinity and 29 per cent analyse behavioural-based data like recent, frequency, and monetary value (RCM).
In an ideal situation, brands and marketers should be curating and analysing all forms of data. With the 3W, 1H (what, why, where and how) formula, brands can draw insights to effectively reach and engage with their customers and ultimately provide a unified, hyper-personalised, and connected experience.
Moving from campaign-centric view to customer-centric standpoint
To build a comprehensive journey map for each unique customer covering every touchpoint in the journey, brands need to shift from a campaign-centric standpoint to a customer-centric view by analysing “delightful/aha” moments and “drop-off”: moments. Focusing only on campaign-centric insights might provide a skewed analysis. Use of technology and a restructuring of the marketing team helps them focus on the customer, and not just the campaign. With this, companies can begin to organise individual interactions with customers and scale up too.
Getting campaign insights from the right segments
Marketers who keep customer preferences in mind while deciding on the preferred channel are following an effective path to customer reach. As the industry moves forward and customer expectations evolve, brands will need to evolve and draw campaign insights from attributes, purchases, likes, and clicks. Unfortunately, factors such as behavioural attributes to figure out a channel and time preference remain the lowest at just 8 per cent of brands using them. However, building advanced segmentation and customer cohorts through the insights can boost the campaign results.
HOW DO YOU USE THE INSIGHTS TO MOVE AHEAD?
Digital marketing demands more than superficial data to draw insights from and a move away from the current tech stack. To deliver a highly personalised experience, marketers and brands need to shift to an insights-led customer engagement platform to stay relevant and create hyperpersonalised experiences.
To remain in the game of retention by deriving insights for long-term business impact, brands can follow best practices and create a win-win situation for themselves and their customers.
In short, adopt the right tech stack by choosing an insights-led customer engagement platform to collaborate and share insights and at the same time, elevate customer experience, keeping hyper-personalisation as the key.
