Big Data: A Game Changer In The Retail Sector

Drones zooming through the skies to deliver us packages that we haven’t even ordered yet – a (somewhat clichéd, already) vision of how technology, Big Data and analytics will impact the retail landscape in the near future.

But flights of fantasy aside, the way we buy and sell is evolving rapidly. Both online and offline, retailers which are embracing a data-first strategy towards understanding their customers, matching them to products and parting them from their cash are reaping dividends.

Although we are not quite (yet) at the stage where drone delivery and mind-reading predictive dispatch are mainstream, things have moved on greatly from early Big Data retail experiments, such as Target’s infamous attempts to work out who was pregnant. Today, retailers are constantly finding innovative ways to draw insights from the ever-increasing amount of structured and unstructured information available about their customers’ behavior.

I have done a lot of work with leading retailers over the past 12 months and thought it would be a good to take a look at some of the cutting edge applications of analytics in the world of shopping – offline as well as online. Major bricks ‘n’ mortar chains have fought hard to keep up with, and in some ways better, the advances in technology driven by the online retail boom. And many have found that their model offers specific opportunities to monitor and understand customer behavior which their online competitors just can’t match.

Big Data analytics is now being applied at every stage of the retail process – working out what the popular products will be by predicting trends, forecasting where the demand will be for those products, optimizing pricing for a competitive edge, identifying the customers likely to be interested in them and working out the best way to approach them, taking their money and finally working out what to sell them next