Steps to Building a Loyal and Profitable Customer Base

Big data technologies such as Hadoop were developed to help large internet companies (Facebook, Google and Yahoo) sift through staggering amounts of data, but many of the applications at first seemed remote from the challenges faced by retailers. Web companies may have huge data sets, but these tend to be "skinny" — billions of rows about a few things. Retailers, on the other hand, may not have the same scale of data, but their data is richer and more complex. Fortunately, as these tools mature, they're proving to be equally as valuable in solving retail marketing problems.