This morning, I stumbled on a great presentation on how Target uses Big Data for personalized marketing. The presenter, Andrew Pole, runs Target’s Guest Data and Analytical Services group. He describes how Target brings disparate data sources to build out a “guest portrait” for each customer and walks through several examples of how this data is [...]
Read moreThe R&D team at CQuotient likes to use tools at the cutting edge (who doesn’t?). So when the time came to select the framework for our cloud-based reporting and dashboarding infrastructure, we decided to give the nodejs/mongodb stack a try. Here is what our stack evolved into: We ended up using the awesome Express framework [...]
Read moreGreat post this week by Ajay Agarwal of Bain Capital Ventures on the history of enterprise software, and how marketing has been under-served thus far. His core thesis is that marketing software historically has focused on improving “the process of decision making as opposed to delivering real insights.” Unlike financial or manufacturing systems which manage [...]
Read moreEvery retailer outside the grocery sector has the same holy grail: one more visit. Grocery stores have it good. The average customer probably shops 40+ times a year. The average non-grocer, on the other hand, has probably 2-6 visits per customer on average. This number masks a lot of variation. Often, 50% or more of [...]
Read moreThere has been a spate of articles recently about the value of using granular data to target customers more accurately and personalize product recommendations (example 1, example 2). The tone of the articles has been positive, bordering on breathless. And given CQuotient’s raison d’être, we are only too happy to see the coverage. That said, [...]
Read moreOne of the hot new terms in retail these days is “Omnichannel.” It was all over the NRF conference in New York this past week. Despite how it sounds, however, it is not just another buzz word. I think it will prove to be one of the defining themes in retail. Bain & Co. defines [...]
Read moreWe just got back from the National Retail Federation‘s Big Show, the premier annual conference for retail technology. The retail technology sector is alive and well. The conference appeared very well attended with lots of exhibiting vendors, large and small. I wanted to share a few (biased, naturally) impressions: There was tremendous buzz around “big [...]
Read moreScott Thompson made the following statement today, only 6 hours into his tenure as new CEO of Yahoo (coming over from PayPal): I am certain that the battle of the next generation of internet businesses will be made up of who has more data and who knows how to use it better than anyone else… [...]
Read moreAccording to Bloomberg, brick-and-mortar retailers are suffering from a case of Web envy. Brick-and-mortar stores have long wanted to track consumers the way online merchants do and are starting to figure out how. They’re using security cameras to monitor shopping behavior and tracking mobile phones to divine which stores people visit. The article goes on [...]
Read moreI just finished reading Customer Centricity Essentials: What It Is, What It Isn’t, and Why It Matters by Professor Peter Fader, who co-leads the Wharton Business School‘s Customer Analytics Initiative. Prof. Fader has published extensively on customer modeling and analytics so I was eager to get my hands on the book. The book is short [...]
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