The business market today

It is a well-known fact that every business is striving to launch more and more products and services. Although this might sound like a good strategy, in the long-term, without having a strong research background, any such attempt made by a company may result in an important waste of time and money without achieving the desired results. For example, Amazon USA nearly doubled its number of available products — from 253 million to 488 million in only two years (since December 2013). That’s an average of 485,000 new products per day! Numbers similar to Amazon’s can be found in most markets worldwide.

Weak results? Identify the problem.

As pointed out by GfK Market Research Institute and Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen, the bitter truth of this development is that 70–80% of all product innovations fail, which leads to investment losses of more than 12 billion USD per year. The most likely reason for this overwhelming number of failures is that companies misunderstand consumer needs, due to lack of information or fake data which inevitably leads to weak results.

So why do companies need personal data?

In the era of marketing 2.0, companies need to check some vital aspects of their business before innovating, starting with the need to know and understand their target customers. Before starting this process, however, personal data needs to be collected, processed and interpreted. The more personal data, from as many sources as possible, the better and more telling the sample will be and hence one’s ability to profit from it. A typical approach is to analyze a large number of touchpoints and use the data obtained to generate actionable forecasts from those and, as a result, derive new products and services from that data. Personal data drives this understand-design-advertise cycle, which is why we believe personal data is the new oil of the 21st century, as we are following along similar lines to the oil boom 100 years ago.

Why forecasting?

Collecting and analyzing personal data allows companies to better forecast consumer behavior and trends — this naturally results in better products and services. Predictable changes in purchasing power, travel habits, mobility preferences, attitudes towards topics like fitness/wellness, health and environment allow companies to come up with, for example, new concepts of cars, novel travel types or radically different hotel concepts. This allows companies to better allocate their budget to certain segments of the market and leads to them better focusing their Research & Development efforts.

Reaching customers

Collecting and analyzing personal data allows companies to better understand and target specific customers. For example, what is a customer’s preferred medium to access the Internet (smartphone, tablet, laptop, PC)? At what time is the Internet accessed? What is their shopping history? What kinds of products and services were purchased and what is the purchasing power of the company’s target customer group? This type of information allows companies to better understand and segment customers and to interact with them in a very customized manner — with the right message, via the right channel, at the right time.

Long-term results

Personal data from and about customers gives companies a huge competitive advantage. Companies that better understand their customers can build smarter products and services that much better meet customers’ desires. The result is fewer failed products and thus fewer failed investments.

Consumer choice and security

Considering the current state of affairs, where big data companies use less than ethical practices to steal people’s private data, without compensation to the people they take this data from, Opiria offers a sanctuary ecosystem where opinions and personal data are not only valued, but also respected. Users of the Opiria platform have the right to choose to whom they sell their personal data to and have this data protected by way of blockchain security mechanisms.

Personal revenue stream

Personal data is created as a byproduct of normal, daily activities, with opinions themselves carrying much weight in terms of data-desirability. As consumers sell this personal data to companies, the PDATA tokens they are recompensed with provide a personal revenue stream that supplements income without adding more work for users, while also being, in essence, a renewable trade good, unique to each user.

Personal data future

Opiria and PDATA are the way of the future for collecting personal data and are already fully General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliant. As these new regulations come into full effect EU-wide, on the 25th of May 2018, the way data is collected must change and the Opiria ecosystem already offers the solution, today.

You can support this new movement towards an ethical approach to personal data by contributing to Opiria’s TGE (Token Generation Event) here. The public sale will start on April, 10th.

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