Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Where Will Big Data and Analytics Create Advantages
for the Company?
Understanding where big data can drive competitive advantage is essential to realizing
its value. There are quite a number of use cases, but some important ones are customer
intimacy, product innovation, and operations efficiency.
Big data puts the customer at the heart of corporate strategy. Information on
social-media platforms such as Facebook is particularly telling, with users sharing
nearly 30 billion pieces of content daily. Organizations are collecting customer data
from interactive websites, online communities, and government and third-party data
markets to enhance and enrich the customer profiles. Making use of advanced analytics
tools, organizations are creating data mash-ups by bringing together social-media feeds,
weather data, cultural events, and internal data such as customer contact information to
develop innovative marketing strategies.
Let's look at few other real-world examples of how big data is helping on customer
intimacy. US retailer Macy's is using big data to create customer-centric assortments.
Moving beyond the traditional data analysis scenarios involving sell-through rates,
out-of-stocks, or price promotions within the merchandising hierarchy, the retailer with
the help of big data capabilities is now able to analyze these data points at the product or
SKU level at a particular time and location and then generate thousands of scenarios to
gauge the probability of selling a particular product at a certain time and place: ultimately
optimizing assortments by location, time, and profitability.
Online businesses and e-commerce applications have revolutionized customized
offerings in real time. Amazon has been doing this for years by displaying products
in a “Customers who bought this item also bought these other items” kind of format.
Offline advertising like ad placement and determining the prime time slots and which
TV programs will deliver the biggest impact for different customer segments are fully
leveraging big data analytics.
Big data was even a factor in the 2012 US Presidential election. The campaign
management team collated data from various aspects like polling, fundraising,
volunteers, and social media into a central database. Then they were able to assess
individual voters' online activities and ascertain whether campaign tactics were
producing results. Based on the data analysis, the campaign team developed targeted
messaging and communications at individual voter levels which prompted exceptionally
high turnout: this was considered one of the critical factors in Obama's re-election.
Product Innovation
. Not all big data is new data. There is a wealth of information
sitting unused within the corporate data repositories or at least not used effectively.
Crowdsourcing and other social product innovation techniques are made possible
because of big data. It is now possible to transform hundreds of millions of rich tweets,
which is a vast trove of unstructured data, into insights on products and services that
resonate with consumers. Data as a service is another innovation that has triggered
a number of data- driven companies. For example, compiling and analyzing transaction
data between retailers and their suppliers and retailers that own this data, can apply
sophisticated analytics to pinpoint process-related inefficiencies and use the insights to
improve operations, offer additional services to customers, and even replace third-party
organizations that currently provide these services, thus generating entirely new revenue
streams.
