Le Tableau Français?

Le Slip Français. Le Rouge Français. L’Appartement Français.

Many French companies are choosing to emphasize their French origins by mention it in their brand name. Is it a good idea? Is it beneficial? Should ClicData consider doing so as well? Let’s examine the benefits of riding this fashionable wave and try to apply it to ClicData’s own Business Intelligence (BI) platform.

What the consumer wants, the consumer gets

Even as the ways that brands reach out to consumers have evolved and multiplied drastically over the past few years, one major marketing principle still holds true: To be successful, a brand must meet its target’s expectations.

At the same time, the market itself is also changing, of course. In the food industry, for example, consumers are demonstrating a clear interest in buying from companies that are more responsible and for their products to be more sustainable and more “locally-sourced.” But this last term is rife with inconsistency and lacking precision. What does “local” really mean?  While to some, it might mean “eating French products,” others might understand it to apply only to products that are grown or produced in or around their town or region. In fact, in the food industry, a product’s “food miles”— the distance the consumable products need to be transported to the consumer—are an important consideration. If its food miles add up to more than 500, the product can’t be labeled “local.”

Food consumers who prefer buying within their local community generally agree that their concern includes the preservation of their region environmentally, socially, and economically. To them, consuming local translates to:

• Preserving the environment by limiting food transportation from one point to another

• Supporting the local economy by supporting local producers

• Supporting health goals because the products are fresh and seasonal, and their origins are not unknown. Food products that originate nearby usually retain much more of their nutritional value since transport times are reduced so significantly.

What about other sectors? Within the fashion industry, consumer aspirations drove the founders of Le Slip Français to include its French roots right in their brand name to remind consumers that their production process was accomplished “locally.”

Trends will continue to move towards satisfying these types of consumer demands. As more data is published, the fans of fast fashion, for example, will inevitably become “slow fashion” customers. Recent studies reveal that one single dye plant in Bangladesh or China releases an average of 100,000 liters of polluted water each day. In these countries—where methods to reprocess water were never maintained properly and have become obsolete—tons of pollutants are dumped into the waterways without any filtering.

Along with the ecological revelations of these traditional practices, data is revealing severe ethics concerns. Workers in many spinning mills are unprotected yet exposed daily to unprecedented amounts of fiber dust. Those in charge of dyeing cotton very often suffer from diseases that are found to be related to toxic heavy metals contained within the dyes.

Regardless of the industry, the search for higher quality products has encouraged French brands to focus on local production expertise. Exceptional quality plays a big role in keeping the French reputation polished on many international markets. Indeed, it’s the main reason why international consumers are usually sensitive to the French origins of certain products. In Japan, for example, French cosmetics are positioned as high-quality, reliable products, which adds to the conclusion that it is wise to reveal the origins of the product in its brand name.

Promoting one’s “Made in France” status by including “Français” in a brand name can be an effective way for companies to reassure consumers who prefer to purchase their clothes, food, and cosmetics responsibly. It can also help strengthen their brand identity and support their reputation for delivering good quality products in the international arena.

Made in France Software

Let’s take it a step further. Would these market trends also apply to B2B companies, and, in particular, the software industry? While the French government has many good reasons to promote the #FrenchTech to entice international investors, should we, as a French software company, more actively promote the French origins of our BI platform?

Let’s look at what other players on the BI market are doing:

• Tableau Software is probably one of the most sophisticated data visualization tools out there, although it’s very expensive and hard to maintain over time. But when it comes to their brand name, what happened? Are American consumers turning French? Or was the term “dashboards” already taken? Where did “tableau” come from, anyway? In 1690, it meant a picturesque or graphic description or picture. It was inspired by a French word for “painting” and from the Old French for “table,” with a diminutive suffix. In the 19th century, “Tableau Vivant” became a parlor game, literally: “living picture.”

• Toucan Toco is a French software that translates data into graphics. It’s status as a French product isn’t clear, and what they are promising their target customers is not clear either. Sometimes the strategy is just to obtain an unusual name and so stand out—even though they’re taking the risk of being hard to pronounce in international markets.

ClicData believes that a company brand name should reflect what it offers its consumers—regardless of whether it’s a B2C or a B2B product or service. As a result, we came up with the name “ClicData” to broadcast our promise to consumers and businesses alike—Make sense of your data with a simple click.

It’s clear that the primary challenges that companies face relate more to data aggregation than they do to actual reports and dashboards (or “tableaux”). So that is the focus of ClicData’s solution, and that is what our brand name should reflect. For example, here are several data challenges that ClicData helps to solve:

• Facing increasing format diversity. Every day, business analysts have to deal with merging information coming from different data sources, including local database, cloud apps, flat files, sometimes known, sometimes homemade.

• Having new software to integrate. New software products are regularly launched to satisfy new business needs and practices, generating additional data that needs to be integrated into the mix.

• “Online” means “real-time.” As the share of online sales increases, so does the need for real-time key performance indicators (KPIs). Data is only relevant if it reflects the current picture.

• No compromise on data safety. Data scientists need to aggregate business data—confidential, sensitive, and personal—with the confidence that their data storage methods and user administration processes are meeting the most sophisticated standards.

While the name “ClicData” expresses our promise without mentioning of our home country, we believe that being a French software provider is still very relevant in our markets.

• Data privacy. Data privacy has always been a key feature of our offering. We are indeed the only BI cloud platform able to offer dedicated data hosting around the globe at the push of a button—a click, away, you might say!

• High-quality training. Exceptional engineering training is the best foundation for a high-quality product, and French engineering schools are excellent. No wonder French engineers are sought after in so many international markets.

• Proximity. Our proximity to multiple cultures and markets is very relevant while selling on a global scale, both from a language standpoint and to enhance our team’s capacity to open, adapt, and integrate with other markets.

Born French, but an international citizen at the same time

While our product has been engineered in France, our DNA is definitively international. It all started with ClicData’s founder, Telmo Silva, whose roots include a sweet mix of Portuguese and Canadian, makes his home in France. The ClicData team consists of a mix of analysts, sales, marketing, and development professionals spread across three offices. We are one team speaking six languages and embracing even more cultures, all to serve customers in over 20 countries around the world. Indeed, Business Intelligence might be considered a universal need; and every day, we get to witness and experience how an array of industries in a variety of countries have to face the same challenge of pulling data together and making sense of its impact on their business.

ClicData’s multicultural identity doesn’t only apply to the languages we speak, but to our capacity to adapt to a variety of industries and specialties. Indeed, our customers come from sectors as diverse as the healthcare market, retailers, consulting, transportation, and more.

Our support and sales teams spend half of their time working with business managers who are most often from sales, marketing, e-commerce, and financial/comptrolling departments. These managers want to integrate an improved reporting process and are looking for agility and ease of implementation. The other half of their time, our teams interact with business analysts and data scientists who are driven to optimize their data connectivity and data aggregation as their data environments get more and more complex.

Clearly, agility is the key feature of ClicData’s teams as well as its platform. On the software side, ClicData demonstrates agility in its capacity to integrate into many different data environments, to provide 250 connectors, and to adapt to many different collaborative processes, including reports by email or direct access to dashboards via their usual software. Agility is also supplied through the choice each customer has to select their best data storage facilities. ClicData’s agility shines as it offers a highly-personalized BI experience to every user, French or otherwise.