How To Use ‘Big Data’ In A Sentence
(And A Business Plan)
By Debbie Hauss, Editor-in-Chief
There was a time when “Big Data” just meant consumer purchase information and print ad results. Today, although we’re using the same term, it has an entirely different meaning for retailers.
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Big Data now encompasses data from video, SMS messaging, call centers, social media channels and mobile technology. “Now retailers must understand customer ‘interactions,’” noted Rob Berman, Vice President, Global Alliances for Teradata, in a conversation with me at the Teradata Partners conference, last week in Washington DC.
The goals remain the same — to target individual customers with relevant messages and the right product at the right time — but the game has clearly changed.
Not surprisingly, there’s lots of chatter about Big Data in the retail community. Just recently, Retail TouchPoints published a three-part feature covering loyalty, with Big Data on center stage in Part III: Big Data’s Role In The Loyalty Equation. One step to managing Big Data, according to Chris Cunnane from Aberdeen, is “By standardizing data collection guidelines, customer information is more easily analyzed in a central analytics application.”
A number of industry executives have been anxious to share their viewpoints on Big Data with Retail TouchPoints, including this article from Jen Millard of Truaxis, titled: Consolidating Big Data To Create One View Of The Customer; and insights from Alexei Agratchev of RetailNext, in an article titled: Introduction To Applied Big Data For Stores.
We’ve even published an infographic on the topic, called Taming The Big Data Beast. If it’s really a “beast,” then we all need to stand up and take notice immediately!
At the recent Teradata Partners conference, Big Data was the central theme. Retailers like DSW, Cabela’s, Macy’s, RadioShack, Supervalu and Barnes & Noble, shared their insights on how they are using Big Data more effectively to improve their businesses.
DSW is using Big Data to become relevant to its 20 million loyal rewards members, by creating 10 shopper “clusters,” noted Kelly Cook, Senior Vice President of Marketing for the 350-store shoe retailer. “Being able to tie qualitative findings back into the database is part of our secret sauce,” she said. Additionally, with 1.5 million Facebook fans, DSW takes social channels seriously, studying the database to understand these customers. “The ROI analytics on Facebook is not a guess,” Cook explained. “We know which customers are on Facebook. And have a rich database allows us to identify what Facebook customers mean to us.”
Macy’s has taken a unique approach to using Big Data, by deciding to localize assortments per store, across the 800-store chain in the U.S., Guam and Puerto Rico. The $26 billion department store retailer selected a number of solutions from Teradata to achieve this lofty goal, and to date the results have been impressive. For the businesses that have converted to the new systems, Macy’s reported a 7% increase in sales vs. the previous year, with a 2.6% increase in inventory, according to Wade Latham, Director of Business Process. Latham also noted that those stores enjoyed a 180 basis point improvement in out-of-stock levels.
Retailers that embrace the new concept of Big Data, and don’t shy away from the inevitable changes that must be implemented, will likely be successful in their efforts to improve sales and efficiencies in the long term.
Follow Debbie on Twitter: @DHauss
