Question

1. What is BIG DATA how could retailers use them?

2. Excluding the creation and administration of cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin, how could BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY help retailers improve their operational efficiency. Give one example.

3. Outline the principles of benchmarking for a retailer.

Answer 1

1.

The main purpose for any Retail business today is to seek advantages of the available data, based on the financial transactions or customer interactions with the Retailers, in order to increase the efficiency of the Retail performance and thereby building a competitive edge over others in a given marketplace. The availability of data especially that of the consumer trends and preferences, help in offering relevant products to the various market segments thereby increasing the chance of the Retail business to survive and grow in the long run. Big data is therefore important because it comes to the picture here where, in the era of digitization, when availability of electronic data plays an even more important role. Big data enables cloud storage to store enormous amount of information and to analyze the same. In fact, data today are rather sold or traded in the market, which was not a trend before. The usage of big data is now evident everywhere. Studies have shown that the Companies that are using Big data in whichever form, have the potential to perform far better than its competitors in the industry. Further, Big data’s success could be facilitated more due to the willingness of the retail customers these days, to share their information online, which forms the basis of the commercial success of both the Big data and eventually, to the Retailers who use it in a big way.

                                          

It could help Retail Organizations in the following ways:

• The marketing opportunities have got a boost due to the creation of Big data.
• The customers’ willingness to share their data especially on the online platform unlike their reluctance in the previous times, have aided the success of Big data which relies highly upon the responses of the customers and their information. This has in turn helped the Retail Organizations to understand the customer as a whole rather than just knowing the customers as a demographic study.
• It has enabled an efficient flow of two-way communication system from the customers to the Retail Organizations and vice-versa. The customers in fact, also respond to the activities of the Organization by way of using the social media or internet media to voice their opinions. Accordingly, it has given an impetus to the Retailers, to understand the responses of the customers in a major way and accordingly place their products in the market. This is the Organization’s way of responding back to its customers.
• It has especially help the online Organizations such as Google or to even the social networking sites like Facebook to avail the advantage of Big Data in order to convert the same into an attractive form of business.
• Customizations of online campaigns have become more feasible due to Big data.
• The benefits are also reaped from the feeds of the social media, posting of images by the social media users or even videos in the genre of internet marketing. Moreover these benefits are reaped with cost-efficient tools of the Big data.
• It gives an overall picture of the consumer trends based on the real-time data base.