New technologies continue to transform how consumers communicate, engage, and purchase brands. Geo-location services and Internet of Things devices are generating data that can be used to gain competitive advantage through insights and innovation.

Moreover, advanced analytics capabilities applied to both new and existing data can help to identify patterns, preferences, and trends that enable more effective product innovation, more compelling customer engagement, and more agile operations. Agile innovators exploit technology to develop new business models that have disrupted the consumer industry landscape and changed consumers’ expectations.

DATA IS THE FUEL OF ALL INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGIES 

How do businesses win their customers hearts and stay ahead of competition? Being a winner in an over-crowded market requires you to become a disruptor yourself by finding new ways to understand, engage and serve consumers across your channels. The winners easily adopt new technologies powered by data, which are redefining possibilities. Analyzing and understanding complex and ever changing demand data signals can help businesses to overcome challenges and to embrace innovation.

EYES ON THE PRIZE

In recent years, there has been significant investment in personalized marketing and in e-commerce to deliver a great digital customer experience and drive revenue, but the brick and mortar store has been left somewhat under invested in. The store matters a great deal for consumers who have a tangible shopping experience within its four walls that not only matches the convenience and ease of online shopping, but also offers ancillary benefits, such as selecting your own products and seeing new brands. Furthermore, stores continue to function as inventory distribution points, to give the supply chain more flexibility, to fulfil online customer orders in a more optimized way, and to use inventories more flexibly and more cost-effectively.

Therefore, it's time for retailers and brands alike to exploit their physical presence and win the next phase of the battle. There has been great use of data for enhancing operational efficiencies in manufacturing and supply chain. But what about the basics - right product, right place? Along the way, the customer intimacy and relevance has been forgotten.

WHO ARE THE WINNERS?

The aim of retailers and brands to achieve efficiency and grow operational scale has come at the cost of customer intimacy. Whereas, not long ago, the traditional local proprietors were successfully making business decisions based on their knowledge of the neighborhood’s habits and preferences, today’s large enterprises often fail to reflect local differences, instead basing decisions on averages and aggregate historical data. As a result, today’s stores are often piled up with slow moving products, while customers look in vain for what they wish to buy.

Tapping into what the neighborhood surrounding a distribution point, and other factors outside your control, can tell you about the local demand patterns and drivers thereof. With this insight, businesses can replicate the traditional proprietor’s gut feel process of analyzing multiple data sources and turning them into actionable insights, deployed at scale. This can help large business better serve today’s highly demanding consumers and drive operational efficiency.

 “Data-driven” stores – especially stores driven by local data insights – can offer a great means of differentiation. From the consumer perspective, finding the products they care about when and where they want it; from the business perspective, predicting local demand to reflect neighborhood characteristics, matching the supply chain with demand to prevent out-of-stocks and to avoid near end-of-life products on the shelves. All that of course means that businesses need to understand what the catchment area of a distribution point cares about, how much the consumers are likely to buy, even where to have distribution in the first place. All neighborhoods are different, and they are often impacted by short term demand drivers such as events or weather, so treating all distribution points the same is counter-intuitive. Hyper-local demand insights technology can help you capture that top-line potential.

 A WINNING STRATEGY 

It is easier than ever to apply multiple sources of data into actionable insights that can benefit your stores, supply chain, sales, and overall operations. 

Hear from industry leaders discussing the value of combining enterprise data with external data to better anticipate opportunities and adapt your tactics. Join me for a webinar on July 26th to learn how to:

Save the date: July 26th at 12:00 PM CDT and register here for this industry webinar to learn more about a winning strategy for retailers and CPG companies to drive better revenue, margins and customer engagement by making use of local data.