Mr Michael Tan, Managing Director, Asia Pacific

Conceived in 1998 in Paris, Numsight Consulting Ltd was set up by five partners as a strategic marketing consultancy with data mining capabilities. Coming from varied backgrounds in consulting, research and development, market research, retail and communications, the five partners shared the same vision of marketing, and the same ambition for their clients.

Newly appointed Managing Director in Hong Kong Michael Tan says, “Our specialty is based on the idea that better understanding of markets and consumers constitutes a major competitive advantage for our clients. Our mission is to help develop and grow businesses through better understanding and transformation of customer knowledge.

“It is our belief that this understanding allows clients to define a more visionary orientation while implementing innovative strategy and effective action plans for more profitability. Our mantra is to transform data into knowledge, and knowledge into growth.”

Numsight, unlike other consulting practice or research agencies, sees itself as more of a strategist that delivers end to end marketing intelligence and consultancy in practical and actionable terms. “We create strategic knowledge by providing a unique combination of marketing and consulting experience, with market research, data analytics, and data management experience. The ultimate aim is to deliver integrated solutions that help businesses develop and grow.”

One principle behind Numsight's success is the setting up of practice groups where they see each project being unique within itself. Customised project teams are assembled to match specific industries and categories comprising of multifunctional expertise and backgrounds, bringing depth and breadth of experiences to the table.

“Our practice groups are customised to needs, comprising professionals highly trained to work together in order to produce relevant and insightful business recommendations. Here, you will see researchers working with specialists in communication, consumer research, or strategic consulting. They are brought together to work on the same project, with the same goals, and this transversal approach has been found to be incredibly effective in delivering outstanding business solutions to our clients.         

“We believe in working ‘hand in hand’ with clients in providing end to end consultancy services, forging long-term partnerships with all our clients, as evidenced by our solid credential of client partnership relationships.”

With its business activities being provided in over 30 countries with managing offices in Paris, Switzerland and Hong Kong, Numsight sees itself as a global company with 80 percent of its services being provided to international clients in more than 35 countries across different continents.

"We have a wide coverage of expertise and experience across all industries from retail and consumer goods and services, like telecom or banking. We think global and act global. In the past 12 to 18 months, we have seen a progressive growth in the Asia Pacific region and are concentrating our efforts in the next few years to drive our market share from the present 20 to 30 percent share of the pie. This is why we have moved to a larger new office on Hong Kong Island to firmly entrench our presence in the region with a stronger team and a solid infrastructure."

The services provided by Numsight can be classified into three major sectors, namely strategic segmentation, innovation programmes and customer knowledge.

The multidimensional strategic segmentation tool has the ability of quantifying accurately and pinpointing major growth opportunities. It helps clients prepare the business planning process as well as define scope of the projects. The innovation programmes deal with identifying future market growth and the best implementation based on concepts and products that will achieve the highest potential.

In order to attain these successes, Numsight brings a unique mix of competencies covering client service management, project management, market segmentation and growth strategy, brand development, research and development and consumer research, leading eventually to supporting the launch of these products in the marketplace.

The customer knowledge sector helps companies get to know their customers better and as a consequence, know how to treat them better, which dramatically impacts on the performance of retailers and manufacturers, financial services and telecom companies.

“All our work starts with data, be it customer data (loyalty program database), sales data or market research data. These insights help us to understand customers and their behaviour and are used for decision-making and to develop customer-driven action plans.”

This program is supported by a state of the art technical infrastructure that includes a data centre for hosting of data-ware or specialised data-marts, business intelligence tools and campaign management tools and processes.

“This greatly improves customer engagement, embedding customer insights into the client organisation and enabling sustainable customer loyalty that delivers better sales, profit and brand value.”

Apart from its multi-functional services, Numsight has developed research and development programmes with the University of Paris XIII and the CNRS (French national research centre), as well as participating with Agence Nationale de la Recherche (French national research agency) in research projects, and Cap Digital where Numsight was identified as a “State of the Art Innovative Enterprise”.

Since 2000, Numsight has participated in the development and the launch of more than 100 new products and many customer programmes. This clearly shows the high success rate the 10-year-old company has achieved.
- Thomas Lim

PHILOSOPHY
We want to deliver high quality consulting at reasonable price points. We have the right balance between senior experienced consultants and young talented professionals – so the ratio of senior to junior consultants remains very high at 5:1. Because of the ongoing growth of activity, we have moved to a new larger office on Hong Kong Island to firmly entrench our presence in the region with a stronger team and a solid infrastructure

FAST FACTS

2008      
• Numsight Consulting Hong Kong expanded to new office
• Set up state of the art IT infrastructure in Europe and Asia Pacific
• Product for development programme for McDonald’s Asia Pacific
• Business and customer intelligence for Carrefour Central America
• 'International Market Research' Award in France for superior method and outstanding strategic and actionable outputs
2007      
• Growth Strategy for McDonald's Middle East
• Strategic segmentation for McDonald's Worldwide
• Growth Strategy for The Coca Cola Company China
• National Public Research Award; New consumer intelligence components for retail
• Business Intelligence for Carrefour South America
2006
• Launched Numsight Consulting Asia Pacific in Hong Kong
• Growth Strategy for McDonald's Asia Pacific
• Product Development and factory transfer for Cadbury Europe