Staying ahead of the curve

With the elections around the corner, political parties are busy preparing their manifestoes. This is where a market research agency comes in to fill this gap. “We work with parties across the country and support them with data and analytics to help them with their political strategies,” says Surya AV, CEO, Convergent View, who has just made a large bid with USAID. “There was a long due diligence process”. Convergent employs more than 400 full-time employees and project staff.

Surya hails from Andhra Pradesh, where he did his MBA from Andhra University and went on to do PhD in behavioural economics. In his journey of 30 years, Surya’s entrepreneurial skills were at play from the very beginning. He rebuilt IMRB-SRI and went on to become the CEO for the public policy division of Kantar, South Asia. He left these comforts and stability in 2020 for his entrepreneurial pursuit. Surya has since set up Convergent, which employs 350 full-time staff advising clients in the domestic and international markets.

“Convergent works with a single-minded purpose of providing high quality insights on how people make their decisions as citizens, as voters and as consumers”, explains Surya, whose key objective is to identify the most authentic data sources to provide strategy and information necessary to solve the clients’ problems, bring back the credibility of the primary data, draw actionable recommendations to help clients in their efforts to design impactful behaviour change, marketing and communication interventions.

In a short period since inception, Convergent has started to provide services to some of the leading organisations in the public policy such as British High Commission, Dalberg, ICRW, GIZ, Access Health, American India Foundation, Projects funded by USAID, GAP Inc, Pepsi, the World Bank and some of the leading political parties in India.

Continuous commitment

“In all the projects we worked on with Convergent, we were always impressed by its continuous commitment to harnessing the power of digital tools for research that not only defines industry standards but also empowers us to uncover hidden trends and behaviour with ease and unprecedented accuracy,” says Pascal Chelala, MD, European Region, Gallup International.

“The quality of services we received from Convergent has always been exceptional, its forward-thinking approach using unique innovation in advanced analytics has allowed us to be ahead of the curve. The most impressive innovation it has done for us was a real time portal for data collection, visualisation and analysis, using the last decade-long data collected across several countries of interest to our client, the European institutions. This interactive portal allowed
us to compare data across geographies, age groups, gender and other demographic characteristics, providing programme and communication professionals with valuable insights for strategic decision making,” adds Chelala.

“Signpost’s collaborations with the research team and its steadfast commitment to Convergent leveraging digital tools for research consistently impresses,” observes Sajesh Raghavan, COO, Signpost, a listed entity. “Their exceptional services, coupled with forward thinking approaches, and innovative analytics, empower us to understand and anticipate consumer behaviour effectively. What stands out is their real time data portal-enabling comprehensive analysis of market-specific consumer behaviour across demographics. This interactive platform provides valuable insights for strategic decision making to programme and communication professionals”.

Surya as a thought leader in the area of research, data and analytics has innovated in the field various methods and techniques. He has brought the data closer to his clients, faster through real-time insights and also deeper involvement of the organisation and the experts in providing actionable insights to help solve the problems.

“I have worked in multiple organisations and multiple sectors. It can be media research, retail, business to business, consumer, FMCG, automotive research and durables, health research, political research. Or it can be social sector. There is a different stream of research,” reasons Surya, who has also been head of the Chennai branch of Nielsen. “Prior to that I was with Scope Marketing which was in industrial research business. I moved to Nielsen when they were still small in India. And subsequently, moved into IMRB, which later became Kantar, a global leader in market research and data analytics. I was working there for almost about 18 years. The last position in Kantar was CEO, South Asia, for one of their business divisions”. He then set up Convergent in 2020.

Branching out

Convergent is now in the process of setting up offices in Europe and the US. “We have been selected by USAID to set up Learning Hub. USAID has multiple implementation partners in India. The role of the Learning Hub is to support the USAID organisational level cross-learning and institutionalise the learnings for the future projects. The organisation also has some capacity building components. Given how the technology is shaping up the data and analytics business, this can play a significant role in the public policy business,” adds Surya.

The market research industry size is estimated to be at R35,000 crore and is growing at 20 per cent every year. India contributes about 5 per cent to the global market “and that tells you about the huge headroom for growth,” adds Surya expecting India to lead the global data and analytics industry in the next 15 years.

Now the next stage for Convergent is to bring in the machine learning and AI models in order to identify the credible data sources and bring together the most insightful strategic inputs for quick and well-informed decision making. “We have the most aggressive clients in this part of the world who are ready to invest in the behaviour change experiments. “All we need is strong entrepreneurial skills and leadership to lead the way. Look at how well public policy clients are serviced by the technology. You know bringing technology closer to the public policy clients is one of our largest business initiatives. We started showing the early results already in a fairly big way. Corporate are well serviced with the technology platforms. But if you look at some of the either public policy clients or some of the leading clients in the political space. Their access to the right data. Their access to the right technology. Their access to the credibility of the information. Their access to the valid information that’s coming to them for their decision making process. This was a big gap”, concludes Surya. 

LANCELT JOSEPH

lancelot.joseph@businessindiagroup.com