iCar Asia shows consumers the road to their Big Data

By Dzof Azmi March 28, 2018

Top-level data will be free; subscription to be charged for reports presented at a more granular level
Data is generated from customer behaviour on their Malaysian website

iCar Asia shows consumers the road to their Big Data

ICAR Asia has launched their Big Data platform and will make available customer behaviour data to consumers such as car manufacturers, car dealers, banks and insurance companies, as well as individuals.

"We have just launched our very first data website with actionable car market data," said iCar Asia chief marketing officer Jonathan Adams (pic, above). Boasting a presence through seven brands with over 400,000 automotive listings reaching 11 million potential car buyers monthly, iCar Asia collects one terabyte of data every month which they will now make available for analysis.

"We collect so much data from our website," explained Adams. "We know what they click on, we know what they're interested in.

"So we know what people are looking for, we know what they are searching for, we know what they want," he continued.

"Anything that you can search for on Carlist we can get it using our market data. It's 24 hours a day, it's instantly accessible," concluded Adams. "We can produce market reports on different types of cars, different makes of cars, different models of cars."

Adams also said that not many of their competitors are working in the same space, so they are dealing with unexplored territory. For example, Red Book also gives valuations for cars, but it does not include customer behaviour, like what colours customers are looking for.

He adds that the objective of Big Data is to produce actionable information that adds value to a business. For example, using their own customer data, iCar Asia can better understand the demographics of who visit their websites.

"We know what people are looking for, we know what they want, we know how much they want to spend on a car that will help us in producing leads and a better overall consumer experience."

These benefits in analysing data will now be shared to other organisations, for example banks and insurance companies who currently process this data manually.

"We can track average prices that are listed on our website we can even calculate depreciation values going from the car that's listed today compared to a car listed five years ago," he said, giving an example of how iCar Data can help predict depreciation values for a particular make and model of car.

"There is so much potential in the amount of data that we collect and what we can do with it," concluded Adams.

Although nobody denies there is great value in the data being shared through iCar Data, exactly how much they will charge for it is another matter.

"We're looking at different levels of subscription values," said Adams, adding that the final pricing will be finalised over the next two months. "There might be a certain amount for free that's very top line, right into very, very location-based data, so we would charge a subscription for that."

Adams admits that this is a project still in flux. "We have so many plans for what we will do with this data on this website in the future," he said. "We are looking at Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia, the three countries that we operate into that makes us the biggest in the region."

The vision for the future is a website that can predict what the customer will be interested in and produce a customised version tailored for them.

But the road on how to get there will be very challenging. Adams said that his marketing team has hired a data analyst with no experience in marketing, in order to give a new perspective on how to use Big Data. He concluded that it wasn't just about finding the answers, "I don't even know what the question is!"

Customers can subscribe to iCar Data service by emailing [email protected] or by visiting http://icardata.icarasia.com/

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