Part of a CEO’s job is defining the company’s relationship with society—its “purpose” beyond a profit motive and how it interacts with an ecosystem of customers and partners. “We see people as part of the system, and we express values of science, efficiency, and quality to all customers,” says Greg Silverman, CEO of market analytics software company Concentric.
For the marketers who use Concentric’s technology, that might mean getting in better touch with the zeitgeist—the trends, problems, and issues that define society—and helping their business develop responses to them. “[By understanding customer behavior], our software helps companies participate in the things that go beyond their profit objective,” Silverman says.
Concentric’s analytics platform enables managers to forecast and simulate consumer behavior on the fly, by considering the effect of factors that could impact a customer’s decision to make a purchase—such as pricing, brand perception, and information on where a product is made or what ingredients it contains.
For Concentric, trust is a critical component of customer relationships. To establish trust, the company operates privacy controls to keep data secure and confidential. Silverman tells Fortune that Concentric set boundaries around data flows as one measure to help prevent a system breach. “The key to our system is that companies operate behind a firewall [a secure barrier between a trusted internal network and an untrusted external network]…we’re not ingesting anyone’s data, so we’re slightly insulated,” he says.
Watch the video above for more from Fortune’s interview with Silverman.
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