Believe it or not, much of the inspiration for this Blog Post came from having coffee with a senior political strategist who’s been involved in everything from the Obama campaigns to the recent crisis in Kiev.
We were taking turns lamenting, as we often do, over the business world’s rampant obsession with big data. While we both agree the collection of big data is not only worthwhile and fascinating, it’s the analysis - or lack thereof - of said data that has us turned off. In his role, as in my own, we often find ourselves urging clients to dig deeper, to blend experience and observation with facts and figures, and to ask more questions. Too often, people want the figures alone to serve as their call to action. But the information that big data draws in should be the precursor to the discussion, not the final summation.
In the bricks and mortar world of retail, experience and observation are essential. If a cold snap hits your region by surprise, you capitalize on promoting your winter merchandise, whether it be space heaters or down jackets. If the hot pop-up store next door is producing traffic from a whole new type of customer you want to appeal to, you use your windows and street signage to draw their attention to your store as well. But in the on-line world, where the audience is broader, observation is certainly needed but number crunching and navigational patterns are exceptionally more significant.
This got us wondering...can we turn the tables and use the principles applied in web retail in a physical setting? Would behaving more like an online store have tangible, measurable results at the bricks and mortar level? So we decided to put our thinking caps on backwards and turn web activities into store-level ones.