Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

With an average website visitor conversion rate of just 3%, retailers struggle to convert sales. Online retailers lose an estimated $18 billion in revenueannually due to last-minute cart abandonment. Remarketing, the use of real-time insights to provide targeted recommendations, is just one effective big data methodology that can yield a 55% increase in spend from cart abandoners. 

Few industries are more impacted by quickly-changing consumer trends than retail. The complexity of consumer preferences means that big data is “especially promising and differentiating” for organizations in this sector, according to IBM’s Rebecca Shockley and Keith Mercier. In a retail environment where consumers take a multi-channel approach to product selection and purchase, creating a 360-degree view of target customers is particularly critical to retaining business.

62 percent of retailers report that increased adoption of analytics is creating a competitive advantage. While retail adoption of third-party data actually lags slightly behind other industries, retailers who optimize for modern cross-channel shoppers are likely to gain an immense lead.  In this article, we’ll explore some ways that modern retailers are utilizing big data insights to understand cross-channel behaviors and create a targeted customer experience....

Bob Ross was a consummate teacher. He guided fans along as he painted “happy trees,” “almighty mountains” and “fluffy clouds” over the course of his 11-year television career on his PBS show, “The Joy of Painting.”

In total, Ross painted 381 works on the show, relying on a distinct set of elements, scenes and themes, and thereby providing thousands of data points. I decided to use that data to teach something myself: the important statistical concepts of conditional probability and clustering, as well as a lesson on the limitations of data.

So let’s perm out our hair and get ready to create some happy spreadsheets!...

So how can an analyst get into a consumer’s mind by analyzing Tweets and how would this information be useful?

To find some answers I teamed up with Marketing Strategist Dr Nikos Dimitriadis to assist me in the actionability and interestingness of each extracted insight.

Note that we capture thoughts from a biased sample which means that we cannot make inferences about the general population. However this work can be a great additional tool for finding new ideas and insights for Marketing initiatives -on top of more traditional methods such as focus groups- and also enables us to form several hypotheses as to what could likely work....