Analytics

In a bold, buzzed-about move at the end of September, American accessories giant Michael Kors acquired Italian luxury brand Versace for a whopping $2.1 billion. This acquisition represents one of the first attempts by a U.S. fashion company to run an elite luxury brand, and not everyone is convinced that the merger was a good…

How are consumers feeling about Black Friday 2018?  According to research that Periscope By McKinsey recently conducted, more than 70 percent of consumers surveyed in the U.S., U.K., Germany and Canada plan to participate in this highly anticipated shopping event. The research explored how consumers planned to shop, what they intended to buy, how much they…

To effectively transform a retail enterprise from data rich to data-led, retailers must make their data actionable. They must turn a data swamp into a smoothly running data stream. This requires clear goal setting, data normalization and seamless bidirectional communications between core systems across the enterprise. Once these basic requirements are met, retailers can effectively…

Retail, specifically e-commerce retail, has been growing for quite some time, and a lot of companies have taken advantage of this growth as they move toward more digital marketing strategies. In fact, some have chosen to forgo a brick-and-mortar store and traditional advertising completely. There’s a lot of information available on retail consumer behavior, but…

In a session at last week’s Shop.org conference in Las Vegas, Tony Flanery-Rye, senior director of growth analytics for eBay, and Andrea Wasserman, vice president, retail experience at Verizon, discussed how their respective companies are using analytics to help them inform marketing decisions. When asked to describe his role at eBay, Flanery-Rye said he counts…

The latest Gartner Hype Cycle for Supply Chain Planning Technologies report predicts that three of the advanced analytic types — predictive, prescriptive and cognitive — are five years to 10 years from mainstream adoption. Other research, such as the Analytics Strategies Study conducted by Supply Chain Insights, shows that 4 percent of respondents have implemented…

We’re saying it: personalization is queen among today’s consumers. Just look at Spotify, which algorithmically delivers a unique 30-song playlist to each of its tens of millions of users every week. Meanwhile, Google Home's Assistant and Amazon.com's Alexa use voice recognition technology to tailor their responses to each member of a household. Nowhere is this truer…

The window for back-to-school (BTS) shopping is shrinking. Research from the National Retail Federation found that families are now doing their shopping later in the summer, often just a couple weeks before school starts. This means that retailers have fewer chances to influence purchasing decisions. And when there are more buyers in play and less…

The retail industry is a growing part of the big data revolution, but exactly how should retail organizations start integrating data analytics into their business models? The question doesn’t have a straightforward answer, but it helps to understand the role of data for modern retail companies. You might be tempted to hire your own data analyst…

In episode 155 of Total Retail Talks, Rodger O'Keefe, vice president of retail store operations at Cycle Gear, provides insights into how the omnichannel retailer of motorcycle parts, gear and accessories is using an analytics platform to help it inform staffing decisions at its 130-plus brick-and-mortar stores, resulting in improvements to the company's bottom line.