Big Data or Big Emotions: Supermarket Strategies

At this time, everyone talks about the famous Big Data and it seems to be the common theme of all the marketers in seminars and specialized books.

But in the food and beverage industry, what does it tell us or what does it do for us? It is very simple, it is the accumulation of data that we can have inside our point of sale or the information that we can accumulate from consumers and analyze it to make the best decisions.

Now, the collection of this data has to be consistent, both in the periods that we recover it and in the quality of it. Let’s take the example of four stores in a supermarket chain.

From them, we can collect the following based on information from some surveillance camera software and cash registers:

  • Number of customers inside the store.
  • Areas of greater stay inside the store, such as dairy, butcher, etc.
    Hours of higher and lower traffic.
  • Types of products that buyers consume and the correlation of these in the purchase tickets, for example 60% of those who buy oil consume meat that day, or 30% of those who consume milk buy sweet bread.
  • Amount of purchase receipts by date of the year.

There can be hundreds of types of information, the important thing is to be concrete in the data that is generated and that is measurable, preferably year after year. With such an analysis we can better understand the consumption patterns of each client.

But as in all history, these numbers are cold and show a graph, now, we have to understand the emotions that exist behind this information.

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Analyzing the emotional factor will allow us to create better call-to-action scenarios in the offers we make, understand why the clientele becomes variable, know in depth what our customers need and why they prefer to drive two more miles to our store instead to go to the one on the corner next to their house.

We have analyzed hundreds of cases where the answers that can give the information are surprising, such as finding that a family reduced the consumption of meat and changed it to chicken to save money and be able to bring their mother to the Christmas holidays, or stop consuming sodas and change them for fruit juices in small presentations since they are families that put the juice box as part of their children’s lunch when sending them to school.

The data by itself has no greater value until it is linked to the emotion that generates it, which is why human behaviors transcend the decision generated by the information.