The following are my notes taken live from a presentation from Susan Williams (Cadillac Fairview) and Susan Ince (Epic Consulting). Notes may have typos in them. A short video with the presenters is below.
Intro: 10 years of data, over 1 million gift card base
Case Study
- gain insight from big data project on shopping centre gift card database
- learn more about consumer purchase patterns to apply to future marketing gprograms
- leverage rich databank of data available
Challenges Mining Big Data
- big data not big research or big quant
- cannot use standard market research software
- clients may be buried in data
- data can be in silos across different business units
- critical data may not be stored in client organization
- need to merge/consolidate files
- surprises when digging begins
Strategy for success
- develop a dat and analysis plan with clients
- discuss areas where clients expect the greatest value/ROI
- match the plan to business stregy
- selected a limited number of areas to focus on or start small
- proceed in stages and make trade-offs/set priorities as you go along based on what will best support client business goals
- clients and data analysts working together in dynamic produces to figure things out
- reporting/results framed for senior executive buy-in
This case study:
The data files:
- very hard to open
- 14 variables (purchase code and card code were the linking variables), created new variables — example lifestyle of card
Plan & Approach
- Initial: Scope, identify issues with merging data, preliminary data runs, establish criteria to filter down
- Decisions/Criteria For detailed reporting used 26 top card values with bases size of 1,000
Learning
- Lifecycle of a shopping card:
- 95% are spent within a year
- 10% are spent within a week to 10 days
- by 2 months over half are spent
- 4 months three-quarters have been spent
Other learnings:
- Approximately 2/3 are spent on one day, with most in just one transaction.
- Average number of transactions per card is 1.9, with the highest about 5.
- The $50 card is the most popular denomination.
Redemption Location:
- 65% of gift carded redeemed are purchased at the same mall
- 35% are purchased from another CF mall
- Proves that the national brand is important because of the 35%
Insights: Top Retailers
- anchors are the top retailers both for$ spend, # transactions and also for cross-shopping
- identified top 20 retailers for both spend and number of transactions
- Hudson’s Bay and Retailers Cross Shopped Most Often
- Apple — 3rd highest in redemptions after Sears and The Bay, top spend per transaction at $123, low cross shop between other retailers, consistent with other analysis done to date
Conclusions:
- Learned a lot more, but learned a lot of what big data can be.
- Important to make sure you have the right questions, do not just go in and pull out “stuff”.
Impact
- Clients need help to get their data out of silos and deliver valuable insights from their big data depositories
- big data needs people with the know-how to look at data, to get into the data, to find models, to integrate from multiple sources and leverage to create vlaue
- market research does not need to be sidelined or end up as roadkill on big data highway