Online retailers harness data and seek a ‘physical’ presence by Jill Puleri, VP and global retail leader, IBM
While many brick-and-mortar retailers expand their online businesses, an increasing number of online commerce sites are taking the reverse route. Piperlime, for example, an online unit of Gap Inc. opened its first retail store in Manhattan.
(via Turning clicks into bricks — and dollars - Outside the Box - WSJ MarketWatch)
” We are a few years away from an economy based on fun,” says consultant @marwschaefer. Games are the newest layer of engagement after augmented reality, mobil and social.
(via The future of business: Six layers of customer engagement)
Using data collected from millions of cell-phone users, Ivory Coast in West Africa optimized its urban transportation system. An IBM model prescribed route changes around Abidjam, the nation’s largest city based on cell phone records analyzing people’s movements. Data was cleansed to prevent identification of phone users.
(via African Bus Routes Redrawn Using Cell-Phone Data | MIT Technology Review)
Using data to power and feed an island nation. Analysis of weather and climate data will help Brunei to: 1) diversify from oil and gas to renewable energy; and 2)improve food security by increasing rice production from 3% to 60% by 2015.
(via IBM Research: Using data to power and feed an island nation)
“Is a social network without integrated analytics like a vehicle without a safety belt?”
Social media hit a low with the Boston Marathon witchhunt, says blogger Eric Schartzman. Analytics, he argues, needs to be embedded in big data.
Via briansolis.com |Without Analytics,Big Data is Just Noise
New IBM Customer Experience Lab focuses on CEO priorities
Yesterday IBM announced the creation of the IBM Customer Experience Lab, an exclusive Research and GBS capability aimed at the front-office agenda of clients in the world of Big Data. One hundred Research scientists worldwide will work with thousands of GBS business consultants to address the emerging C-Suite Front Office Digitization priorities.
Banorte-lxe, one of the leading banks in Latin America, and Nationwide, the world’s largest building society, are among clients already engaged with the Research and consulting experts of the new lab. During its start-up phase, the Lab will focus on six priority industries — Banking, Insurance, Retail, Consumer Products, Telco and Energy & Utilities — and we are going to select and manage the engagements coming into the Lab through GBS Global Industry Leaders and partners.
Imagine this scenario: A dinner guest to The Cheesecake Factory in Louisville, Ky. informs his waiter about some funky tasting ketchup. Simultaneously, across the country in Palo Alto, Calif., a customer complains about the color and consistency of the ketchup on his burger.
Are these two scenarios related and potentially linked back to a bad batch from a supplier? And if so, will The Cheesecake Factory be able to prevent such incidences from occurring?
“You need to take structured data like a restaurant’s location and combine it with unstructured data like the color of the mustard or taste of the ketchup,” said Paul Chang, a program director for the consumer products team at IBM.
For restaurant chains with dozens of locations and hundreds of suppliers, it’s a near impossible task to maintain the consistency of ingredients. One screw up from a supplier and they risk unhappy customers, or worse still, a rogue meatball infected with horse meat.
via IBM uses ‘big data’ tech to keep horse out of your meatballs | VentureBeat
By 2016, 80 percent of marketing tech investments will come outside of IT, Gartner predicts. Here’s where those marketing dollars are going now.
* Marketing automation. Content management and social media monitoring, as well as the automation, aggregation, and analysis of social data. Also, established technologies such as sales-force automation and CRM. These increase the effectiveness of the marketing processes themselves.
* Social technology and mobile technology. Both technologies produce fundamentally different interactions with and among customers. How to take advantage of this? At one end is the monitoring new behaviors — what they comment on in social media and how they shop or look up information when not at a desk, for example. At the other is using these new conduits to customers to serve them actively, such as tapping into location data to provide localized recommendations — marketers use the terms “geotargeting” and “hyperlocal” to refer to these new types of possible services.
* Analytics for real-time business intelligence. Historically, companies have used business intelligence to assess the past, then roll out changes based on that assessment. But in a fast-moving world, that insight often comes too late. Also, it’s typically based on data collected for very specific purposes, so the insights that can be gleaned from it tend to be limited to those original purposes. But new, often cloud-based technologies — collectively called big data — are providing ways to analyze information very quickly (even in real time), from multiple sources. Companies can adjust their operations and marketing more quickly — and even more targeted to specific types of customers
A major mobile initiative from IBM involves software, services and partnerships with other large vendors.
IBM. plans to deploy consultants to give companies mobile shopping strategies, write mobile apps, crunch mobile data and manage a company’s own mobile assets securely. Thousands of employees have been trained in mobile technologies and corporate millions will be spent on research and acquisitions in coming years.
Looking ahead, the most promising of the big data leapfrogging opportunities for Africa lie within the telecom industry. Mobile phones are now widespread, as are SMS based services such as mobile payments and money transfer. Next, observers expect rapid adoption of affordable smart phones capable of handling more sophisticated applications, such as social networking. It all adds up to a massive amount of data in the hands of the mobile carriers about what people are doing with their phones and where they are.
As the mobile market continues to develop, the carriers will be in a strong position to offer their customers new applications and services. They’ll not only own the relationship with the customer, but they’ll see data patterns in customer behavior that helps them anticipate customer’s needs. Marketers have long dreamed of being able to address not just market segments but individual customers. Big data could finally turn this dream into a reality.
