The New Frontier : Data Analytics

The industry explored here is telemarketing, specifically outbound telemarketing whose goal is to get an on the phone customer to purchase a specific

Take advantage of data to offer customers useful and relevant experiences. Learn how to maximize your company’s

The retail industry has seen an increase in revenue as a result of their use of data analytics. The department store, Macy’s, implemented the use and

Understanding consumer behaviour is essential to succeed in business. As Solomon et al. (2013) stresses, businesses exist to satisfy consumer’s needs. By identifying and understanding the factors that influences their customers, firms have the opportunity to develop a more efficient strategy, marketing message and advertising campaigns that is more in line with the needs and ways of thinking of their target consumers (Perreau, 2015).

In this article How Does Target Know so Much about Its Customers? Utilizing Customer Analytics to Make Marketing Decisions, the authors describe the kinds of data needed to recognize changes in a consumer’s habits, privacy concerns that occur when data mining, and marketing decisions made from the information. Whenever shoppers make a purchase or browse their Web site, Target gathers customer information, analyzes it, and might sell the data to other businesses. In fact, all three authors explained, “Target Corporation is a leader in analyzing vast amounts of data to identify buying patterns, improve customer satisfaction, predict future trends, select promotional strategies, and increase revenue.”(Corrigan, Craciun, Powell 159). Along with other stores, Target has created a

Data is an important component used by all technology and businesses to gain insights and refine their marketing techniques to improve customer experience. Through the use of data analysis companies can capture a large amount of data, and retrieve information regarding the company’s trends. In Richard’s case using data analytics allows him to gain better insights on customer behaviors, in which he was able to determine which factors influence a user to purchase the eReader early. These factors will allow the team to develop new business models and improve their marketing strategies to capture these individuals (“Big Data Analytics”, 2017). For example, if most of the early users are from California, it would be beneficial to promote the eReader

It became an issue for consumer, and they felt uncomfortable due to companies invaded consumers privacy without their consent. Another issue regarding data mining is there no clear policies around how the company uses data once they have collected the information. After Target received negative publicity regarding its original data mining approach, they change their strategy by mixing all their ads, so it not that obvious that they were spying on them. It makes customers’ to assume that everyone else gets same coupons and ads. Data mining has given Target awareness into the relationship between product sales and online reviews. Target retailers identify guests how write reviews, examining their history of purchasing and invited to write review on their products. This program was highly successful, leading Target to obtain incremental reviews and increase sales of those key products. More importantly, data mining has empowered companies to find new opportunities for growth, make better decisions to succeed business goals and safe money. The retailer industry utilizes data mining and customer analytics to support customer decisions. Exploring how collected data can be manipulated to identify customers buying patterns and increase profitability is a growing business

(Bhasin, 2014) A question to be answered by data mining is how to identify unexpected shopping patterns in supermarkets? Data mining can acquire significant amount of information on customer buying habits and preferences. The importance of this question is to target marketing campaigns to maximize revenue on every day of the week. The data is taken from operational or transactional activities such as, sales, cost and inventory.

The latest technological development in data analytics and implementation helps organizations gain insights and how to deal with informed decisions.

In order to gain information about the wants of the customers in each region, Macy should collect enough data from its Transaction Process System. The transaction process system will enable Macy’s to view what is being bought in each region. This enables for more accurate data to be implemented in the information systems. When data is collected form TPS, then management can collect the statistical data from the market and analyze them using analytical software applications, such as Hadoop. Another way that they can collect information for their information systems would be to create online campaign, a survey, whatever is available.

As stated above, data mining is often used to solve business decision problems, “it provides ways to quantitatively measure what business users should already know qualitatively” (Linoff, 2004). A growing number of industries are using data mining to become more competitive in their market by primarily focusing on the customers; increasing their customer relationships and increasing customer acquisition.

In today’s world of various products and services, businesses aim to excel and lead the competition by marketing the most number of consumers, which is a full time endeavor of business. To survive in the market, a firm or an organization has to be constantly innovating and understand the latest consumer trends and tastes. Marketers need to understand consumer behavior because the decision-making process for consumers is anything but straight forward. Consumers’ behaviors and their purchasing patterns is a huge advantage to understanding the way customers think and the reason for their purchases. Therefore, the study of consumer behavior is important because it allows the

Walmart is the biggest retailer in the world and handles more than one million customer transactions every hour and generates more than 2.5 petabytes of data storage (Venkatraman & Brooks, 2012). To put this into perspective, this data is equivalent to 167 times the number of books in America’s Library of Congress (Venkatraman & Brooks, 2012). So how can Wal-Mart use this massive amount of data and what useful information can this data provide? This paper will provide a brief overview of the importance of Business Intelligence (BI) and how the largest retailer in world, Walmart, is using it.

Part 2. How Business Analytics can be used to gain advantage in a competitive marketplace

According to Davenport (2006), an analytics competitor has the capabilities of gaining insight based on a consumer’s consumption to better make business decisions while optimizing the business processes. Many top organizations such as Amazon, Capital One and even the Boston Red Sox have implemented programs that allow for their company to better determine the products and prices of products that appeal to consumers. These programs also provide companies with the power to determine how to market, based upon the consumer’s fluctuating income and its influence over the rising and falling of demand and supply chains. While this process of collecting and processing data may be beneficial to the company, the data gathered should be collected in an ethical manner. (Davenport, 2006, p.99-100)