Canadian Retailer - Holiday 2016 - 20

KPMG EXECUTIVE ROUNDTABLE
Kruh: Retailers do a great job of collecting customer
data. However, converting that data into insights is
still something most within the industry struggle with.
Analytics, predictive analytics and tools to understand
the customer better are being used to great success by
some retailers across the world. How are your organizations leveraging data and analytics to inform your
marketing, technology and supply chain strategies?
Bennison: We've been investing in data and analytics from
the start and will continue to do so. At the moment we're
taking every single transaction that we've made in our first
couple years and trying to analyze each of them as deep as
we can from as many different angles as possible to understand who's coming in to the store, when they're coming in,
why they're coming in, how often, what they're buying and
what they aren't buying. It's a critical point for us, being such
a young company. To be able to analyze our data and to put
it to work for us to inform our strategy will be critical. We're
definitely investing in predictive analytics. It allows us to
target our digital spend far more aggressively.
Green: For us the big focus is on attribution. We're investing a lot of money

x2
2016

2018

Double the data
The use of Big D&A will
double by 2018
Source: Stats on Big D&A from
TOM 16

About
half

Data revolution
By 2018 about half of
companies surveyed will
use smart technologies
and analytics to enhance
decision-making.
Source: Stats on Big D&A
from TOM 16

20 |

in understanding the pre-buying cycle and what impressions are impacting
our consumers' decision to purchase. Data helps us understand consumer
responses to our brand, from the time they're first introduced to the time they
make a purchase. But before investing in data analysis, you've got to make
sure you're not overdoing it. The blend of science, art and instinct has to be
there. Everything we do is based on data because we believe it helps us make
great decisions.

Jones: Because we do millions of transactions every year on thousands of
items, our data allows us to do a lot of predictive things. But we're actually
leveraging it more today to better understand how the products that we sell
can teach us about the other things that our consumer purchases. It can be
complicated. But, you can really start to understand the likelihood of what
a customer's going to purchase based on what they historically purchase. It
also helps us figure out what we should put on the front page of our flyer as
opposed to the back page.
Labistour: Because we're a member-driven organization, we have a lot of
data. Our challenge, however, is that we don't yet have enough intelligence.
We're on a journey to convert the data to intelligence. That's where the rubber is really going to hit the road for us. You can obviously have a lot of data,
but if you can't make sense out of it, it's useless to you.
Lawson: We're data rich and information poor. We do 45 million transactions
that go through our POS on an annual basis. That's a lot of items. But it's
only been in the last couple years that we've started to put analytics behind
it. When you have all of this data, how do you realize its potential? We've put
a lot of time into demand forecasting, something that's a little more predictive. Ultimately, I think data can help you market better and more precisely
to your customers; to each segment of customer who's looking for different things from you, at different times, in different ways. And, if the data's
analyzed properly, it can also help a great deal with respect to merchandising
and informing where you should be positioning your product in the store to
generate the greatest return possible. There's so much potential for us when
it comes to the data we collect. We just need to become a lot better at analyzing it to realize that potential.

CANADIAN RETAILER | The Loss Prevention Issue

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Canadian Retailer - Holiday 2016