Retail

Syndicated from Smart Data Collective Andreas Weigend, former amazon.com Chief Scientist, gave a keynote on the unrealized power of data. He started with a historical perspective. In the 70s perhaps 10M used computers, mostly in the back office. By the 80s this had reached 100M and the front office. By the 90s the internet and [...]

Pierre Haren started up the keynotes with some personal comments about the excitement of being part of IBM, seeing more customers at DIALOG and hearing stories from customers about what they are doing with ILOG products. He is clearly enthused by the opportunity to reach more companies by being part of IBM than they ever [...]

Joe McKendrick pointed me to a story on ABC News today –  ‘Good Morning America’ Gets Answers: Some Credit Card Companies Financially Profiling Customers. The story is worrying and has some good reporting in but, as usual, the analytics behind the whole thing are poorly described. So, first things first. The headline gets us off [...]

BusinessWeek had an interesting article in December about the growth of Tesco, a British grocery chain, and on its use of data mining as a competitive weapon. Here’s a quote: Analysts say that Tesco’s big advantage over major international rivals, which also include Germany’s Aldi and Lidl, is its unrivaled ability to manage vast reams [...]

Tom Davenport has done some research into analytics and retail (reported here: Retailers recognise analytics as key to business transformation. Here’s a quote from the new item: Retailers today are searching for ways to derive more customer intelligence, marketing savvy and operational insight from their overflowing databases. In addition to acknowledging that the use of [...]

I got a briefing on IVIS Group’s Sonetto product this week. Sonetto is most famous as the platform for Tesco’s multi-channel strategy. Sonetto is a product designed to focus on multi-channel operations, especially (but not exclusively) multi-channel retail. They make the very valid point that multi-channel retail is complex. Not only do retailers have multiple [...]

Last week I saw a post comparing Best Buy and Circuit City – one thriving and one going into bankruptcy – and it made me think about the role of decision management in Best Buy’s success. I have head Best Buy present various times an a number of elements of their successful customer-centricity strategy are [...]

Two gentlemen from Deloitte presented Integrating Predictive Analytics and BRM to Improve Health Plan Member Experience. 80% of healthcare costs are incurred by 20% of members and traditionally the 20% get all the focus. Analytics and data mining get applied to claims, authorization, costs as a result. Segmentation focuses on the unprofitable and unhealthy. Increasingly [...]

I live in Palo Alto and a new Mountain Mike’s Pizza has just opened up near us. Much as we like MM pizza we have two problems – we like wholewheat dough and, as several members of my family are lactose/milk intolerant, soy cheese. If you have visited or live in Palo Alto you will [...]

1:1 had a nice piece on the growing role of loyalty programs in retail. This noted the “Growing sophistication in loyalty programs” among retailers and, in particular, the use of loyalty program data not just to calculate lifetime customer value but also to build competitive advantage. This second aspect is the one I always find [...]

Some time ago I saw an article that discussed the 8Ps (4 old, 4 new) of Marketing. It seemed to me that decision making, especially operational/transactional decision making is critical to most of these Ps. Here, then, is my summary of the 8Ps and why decisions, and decision management, matter. 4 Ps Product You might [...]

The Oakland Athletics Score with Mobile Coupons headlined an article about this new approach to delivering coupons. Reading this it seemed to me that this was an opportunity for the Oakland A’s, well known for their use of analytics in player selection, to bring analytics to bear on the marketing operations. Mobile coupons are constrained [...]

Erik Klein from the WebSphere Commerce group at IBM and Scott Young from a consultant. Erik started by discussing the inhibitors to moving to multi-channel and customer-centric. These include: Siloed business units Applications that don’t integrate or support multi-channel operations Redundant data in multiple systems, no single version of the truth The different domains – [...]

[amazonify]0470043555:right[/amazonify][amazonify]0470043555::text::::Chocolates on the Pillow Aren’t Enough: Reinventing The Customer Experience[/amazonify] I have just finished Jonathan Tisch’s book Chocolates on the Pillow Aren’t Enough: Reinventing The Customer Experience.The author is Loews Hotels chairman and CEO and is clearly very knowledgeable about the customer experience and how to improve it. The book has two main sections – [...]

[amazonify]1401302378:right[/amazonify][amazonify]1401302378::text::::The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More[/amazonify] Chris Anderson does a nice job of introducing some key concepts that are redefining business in the Internet era. As he says “The era of one-size-fits-all is ending, and in its place is something new, a market of multitudes”. In this world [...]