TransGaming Inc.

"Zynga's chief creative officer spoke at a conference I attended, and he told a story about a banner that they wanted people to click," recalls Vikas Gupta, CEO of TransGaming, a multiplatform gaming company. "There was some discussion about making it green, since green is considered soothing. Others thought people wouldn't click on green, so finally they decided to do some A-B testing (in which two different versions of a website are offered and users' responses to each are compared). To everyone’s surprise, the color that got clicked the most was magenta. And so they started using magenta for the banner and for other things as well."

This kind of detailed research into customer preferences is very powerful, says Gupta. "Zynga is a very data-centric company. They collect data on everything, and they have some very sophisticated analytics capability. We live in an era when if you're not collecting data, you can’t know what’s going on, and you can’t react to consumer behavior."