As the retail industry grows bigger and bigger every year, marketers are coming up with different ideas as to how they can predict the behavior of consumers. One effective way they came up with is through data mining.
Data mining is the process of getting new data from an already established data. It involves “discovering patterns in large data sets involving methods at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and database systems.” It has many uses in different fields like in this case, the retail and business realm.
Data mining is applied in the retail industry to predict an accurate consumer behavior or retail trends. Once the previous data and information are gathered, marketers use the method to extract new and unidentified behavior from the data.
Every consumer has different buying behavior. They all have their different groups where you can identify their specific needs and wants. Also, a consumer’s behavior also differs when they buy online and on the retail store itself.
Creating trends through data mining
Trends differ each year. In 2017, according to Vend’s “2017 Retail Trends and Predictions” report, unique in-store experiences will flourish just as much as mobile payments solutions will. There are now more than 447.9 million mobile payment users worldwide. It was also predicted by Tech Crunch that more than half of mobile users will pay through the same method. Moreover, according to Business Insider, in the year 2020, people will pay more than $503 billion through mobile payment.
These predictions of consumer behavior are mostly result of data mining. One of the most accurate trends predicted was the boom of personalization when it comes to retail stores and online shopping. It has been a growing trend this year and it will be the norm for next year. Being able to know a customer or client personally will be a norm in the future too. This is going to need a lot of data gathering and data analysis and storage to keep up with this demand.
Another trend that was predicted after data mining was the use of Omni-channel. To cater to their customers’ needs, retailers have invested huge amount of money and their time to improve their omni-channel service and communication system.
2018 trends for retailers
For next year, companies and businesses will focus more of their attention into data. They have already seen the importance of data mining so more and more businesses will invest to that. Forbes released a report saying one of the top retail giants in the business is using data mining and other data analysis to get their work done.
Many other retail companies like Amazon and Walmart are doing it already. They are using data and analysis to learn their consumer’s behavior so that they can improve their services and revenues in the near future.
Through the data that companies and retail stores have gathered, they were able to tell what will be the trends next year. Through data mining, the top companies, retail and online stores can now base their marketing tactics through it. They can now gather ideas to entice consumers and customers into buying their product. They can also customized their products or change their brand if it does not fit the incoming trend.
