Big Data and Grocery Shopping?

One may not commonly think of Big Data and Grocery shopping in the same sentence, but Big Data is everywhere. It is a part of your devices, your T.V., and your weekly trip to the super market. Big Data is now being used to predict the future of products and hopefully ensure the quality of what we see on our store shelves.

Data was not always Big, in fact it started out very small. As creatures of habit, most people shop in patterns, buying the products they like and trust. These patterns are the type of thing shop owners would keep track of, allowing them to provide specific products for their clientele. Once this idea took on a larger scale it slowly transformed into Big Data, studying millions of consumers and products across the nation.

Recently a group of marketing scholars put together a study on consumers of a chain selling consumer packaged good over the course of two years. The data produced from this study allowed them to see a pattern between the consumers of a product and its success. Usually a product’s success is determined by the rate of its early sales, but what this group has found is that it is more telling to look at who is buying rather that how many are being bought. They discovered certain consumers have a knack for buying products that fail within a few years. These consumers happened to be well off individuals with larger families, people with the kind of financial safety to risk trying a new product on the shelf. This study birthed the idea to take this experiment to a larger scale.

These marketing scholars are now researching their theory on six major grocery stores across the nation, collecting mass amounts of data and searching for a pattern to support their previous findings. With this larger data set the researchers now believe they have a better chance at discovering the set of consumers who determine a product’s success. The more data collected from these types pf studies, the more we can use it to predict future success or failures of a product. With this type of future knowledge producers will be able to pull their product from the market more quickly if they see the patterns for failure, saving both the producers and consumers time and money.

As researchers continue to discover useful patterns in this marketing world, they hope to expand to other areas such as movies and movie theaters. To learn more about using big data to predict the future success of a product or how it can help companies save money, click here!