Fashion Industry and Big Data

In this post and the next two posts, I am going to write about big data and how fashion industry leverages it.

In social media era, people opinions become very powerful and effective on many sectors such as the fashion sector. A lot of fashion brands pay attentions to people's comments, likes, tweets and other interactions and turn them into engaging sessions which actually give them strong support and inspiration of its audience. Through active social media, growing of content and people's constant engagement which gives the players in the fashion industry the opportunity to know about their customers and then create new ideas and fashion concepts by using Big Data.

In the following image, there are 14 fashion trends chosen by audience which describes how people can express their opinions about what they like or dislike about latest fashion trends, and how they engage with them.

Fashion Industry and Big Data ( Part 2)

There are huge sets of data that paly major role in the fashion industry; big data helps fashion industry to reveal patterns, associations and trends.

Whether data is structured or unstructured, it can be analyzed, divided into groups or categories and then data form a definition about the latest patterns and trends in the fashion sector.

Sources of Big Data

With digitization, modern fashion styles and trends have taken into popular social media platforms, in the digital sectors. Nowadays, people prefer to go online to talk about their favorite cloths and fashion styles. There is a statistic says that over 70% of the world being online, thus the digital mediums such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and others are filled with likes, comments, tweets, pins, Instagram, LinkedIn shares. When it comes to fashion, almost every day in brand new day in this field, every day more number of people shares their ideas, thoughts and theory and concepts about fashion. in addition, trends are constant, it keeps changing and people in social media keep taking about what they like or dislike about those trends. Lately, designers, brands and retailers are growing in the fashion industry, and they tend to use online platforms, especially social media. The fashion industry is expanded through social media and it can be tapping into consumers, across the globe. people who are working or engaging in the fashion industry can easily add a lot of productivity in developing creative fashion ideas for the world. Designers, retailers, and fashion brand need to collect feedback from their audience such as, comments that express their opinions, likes, shares and other interactions. After they get such data, they spend time to understand it, analyze it and then take insights to fashion ideas forward, it all goes to big data that make it possible.

How fashion business leverages social media comments

People put in their opinion and give their preference after almost every fashion show that stream in YouTube, Facebook or any other social media platform. It is really helpful for the fashion industry to know their audience, and their likings, and show them a way-forward. Also, it is beneficial from the perspective, designers can sell their products, as desired by their targets. fashion magazines tend to use online platforms in order to hear what their audience have to say. By collecting information from Big Data, and analyze it ; designers, the fashion brand heads, and magazines elicit their next fashion trends.

For more on this click here

Fashion Industry and Big Data ( Part 3)

According to a team of researchers, “Big data may be the next new thing to hit the fashion industry's runways” University Park, Pennsylvania. Heng Xu, associate professor of information sciences and technology, Penn State claims that researchers were able to identify a network of influence among major designers and track how those style trends moved through the industry; by analyzing relevant words and phrases from fashion reviews. Heng Xu, associate professor of information sciences and technology, Penn State claims that researchers were able to identify a network of influence among major designers and track how those style trends moved through the industry; by analyzing relevant words and phrases from fashion reviews.

The availability of large amount of data that facilitate finding patterns, creating correlations and identifying trends that are emergent is becoming very popular, and it applied to various sectors and industries such as , politics and health care, it is known as data analytics.

"what we wanted to see is if data analytics could be used in the fashion industry," said Xu "We were drawn to the question of whether or not we could really trace a hidden network of influence in fashion design." December 18, 2014 The researchers presented their findings at the Workshop of Information Technology and Systems in Auckland, New Zealand, analyzed 6,629 runway reviews of 816 designers from Style.com, formerly the online site for Vogue, one of the most influential fashion magazines. The reviews covered 30 fashion seasons from 2000 to 2014

According to Xu, "the researchers team extracted keywords and phrases from these reviews that described silhouettes, colors, fabrics and other details from each designer's collections and added them to the dataset"

click here to read the full article

Google Analytics

Since we are studying Marketing Analytics course which is primarily based on analyzing data by using Google Analytics, I decided to look deeper into Google Analytics and its benefits, features and user satisfaction.

Google Analytics Overview:
It is one of the most popular web analytics' in the world which uses by thousands of companies all over the world. It has been imposing standards of business intelligence, uniting a variety of premium analytical features both for traditional and mobile users, since it was launched in 2005. Google Analytics concentrated on functionality and quality. it works with various number of funnel visualization techniques, and it summarizes data on high quality dashboards where users can read different types of reports. Google Analytics works with tracking codes, which load larger JavaScript files from the web server, and set variables for each of them. This is the main feature that makes Google analytics unique. The code is automatically loaded and collects relevant data from the browser, once the users starts browsing their website. Cookies will be sent by the activation of the code to users’ devices in order to gather anonymous Client ID information, also examining the actions that is performing on the website by users.

Google Analytics becomes available for mobile usage; moreover, it offers a specially developed Mobile Package with mobile site-ready tracking codes, including such that work with PHP, or JavaScript Pages.

There are so many benefits of Google Analytics, one of the most important benefits is how this platform helps users to understand their visitors and find out the reasons of visiting their website and most significantly is to determine why your visitors did or did not convert. Google Analytics gives the users the opportunity to base decisions on empirical data before starting on analyzing the real business to avoid throwing money away. Google Analytics makes this possible in different ways, with its four Advanced Reporting areas.

-        Google Analytics users will get to know who are their audience

-        How did those visitors come to their website?

-        What did they do while exploring the website?

-        Finally, figuring out if the visitors converted or not

Once the data classified on the dashboard, users can start using that data for example to optimize their marketing campaign, devote time to activities that help their business. Users can also leverage the dashboard information to analyze the content and understand which elements on your website are not performing so well. Google analytics offers reports for conversions and specific behavior, which explain the reasons of why the website is doing better or worse than before; that help to prevent spending money to examine these matters later.

Some Google Analytics’ features:

-          Advertising Reports

-          Campaign Measurement

-          Cost Data Import

-          Mobile Ads Measurement

-          Advanced Segments

-          Content Experiments

-          Dashboards

-          Custom Reports

-          Real-Time Reporting

-          Audience Data & Reporting

-          Flow Visualization

-          Social Reports

-          Filters

-          Multi-Channel Funnels

-          Event Tracking

-          In-Page Analytics

-          Site’s Speed Analysis

How much dose google analytics cost?

Google Analytics offers for small business life-time free packages. they can monitor a single mobile app or website, adding a tracking code and research their audience. "In terms of enterprise pricing, the company offers a suite of advanced applications, including Analytics 360, Tag Manager 360, Optimize 360 (beta), Attribution 360, Audience Center 360 (beta), and Data Studio 360 (beta), which can be purchased together or separately, and are priced on quote basis. Make a request to the company to obtain your price."

Dose Google Analytics users satisfied?

It is important to know if the buyers either companies or people satisfied of with the product or not, and not only depends on how experts evaluate it in their reviews. Google Analytics created behavior-based Customer Satisfaction Algorithm which gathers customer reviews, comments and Google Analytics reviews across a wide range of social media sites.

After the information has been gathered, it shows the negative and positives people experiences with Google Analytics. thus, it facilitates the purchase decision.

For more on this click here

Analytics with Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is one of the analytics tools that collects visitors’ information such as their clicks on a web page and represents data on a visual manner. In Crazy Egg, there is something called “snapshot storage” which is the first step after signing up. It is like a moment in time for a given page. After a Snapshot has been created, there is a code that should be entered in the footer of a web page and Crazy Egg then starts tracking. Crazy egg is not a free tool and there is a plane starting with $9 / month.

Some of Crazy Egg Reports:

Heat Map

It is the most popular data reports of Crazy Egg. Heat map is created based on the actual clicks of visitors, it shows how they engaged with a website. The areas that are glowing are the popular click areas.

Scroll Map:

It represents the amount of time that visitors spend in viewing particular sections of a website, which helps to re-prioritize sections on the site based on the more popular page section.

Confetti:

It is similar to what the heat map represents, but much deeper. According to visitors clicks, it shows the most popular sections’ clicks. In every single click, it holds various information, categorized by browser, used devices, country, etc. Clicks or dots with the same category have the same color.

For more information about Crazy egg click here

Google Analytics vs. Crazy Egg

Google analytics works with numbers of techniques of funnel visualization. It summarizes data into high-level dashboards which gives users the ability to creates different types of reports.

Crazy Egg focuses on visualizing data reports. It creates visual representations of the information that show the popularity of every sections and visitors clicks on a website.
cost:
Google Analytics offers free package for small business. It allows them to add tracking code, monitor a website or mobile add and reach their audience. For the enterprises, Google analytics offers a set of advanced applications which should request from the company to obtain the price.
Crazy Egg offers four plans based on monthly payment, basic plan $9, standard plan $19, plus plan $49, pro plan $99, also it offers annually subscription.
Features:
There are more than 30 features available of google analytics such as, dashboards, real-time reporting, advertising reports, campaign measurement, cost data import, mobile ads measurement, remarketing, search engine optimization and advanced segments.
Crazy Egg features are scroll map tool, heat map tool, confetti tool, simple setup, design testing, In-page analytics, conversion rate optimization, CRM.
In terms of available languages, Google analytics available in USA, UK, Canada, International, China, Germany, India and Japan while Crazy eggs only in USA, UK, Canada, International.

click here to read the full comparison.

Predictive Analysis – McDonald’s

In the previous post, I wrote about JMP statistical software and how McDonald’s leverages it. In this article, I am going to write about McDonald’s and its predictive analysis.

According to Cramer, JMP software allows his team to get better understanding of data through visual representation and use data visualization to predict customer behavior and trends successfully.

Senior Industry Advisor of Retail, Hospitality and Consumer Goods Industry Strategy in EMEA at Intel, David Dobson said: “Today's retailers all understand the importance of analytics but the biggest challenge is having the correct tools to collect information and having a skilled workforce who understand data and extract value from it”

McDonald’s uses analytics and it relies on its data to measure restaurant performance, and make decisions related to equipment, location, human resources, and the supply chain.

McDonald’s uses various technologies and techniques in order to obtain successful predictions such as:

-        Video Analytics, helps to track time that customers spent in the store on drive-through for use in process and conditions measurement

-        Quantitative video ethnography, in order to learn the behavior of people using its drive-through lanes

-        Eye Tracking, by tracking customers’ behavior in store and try to answer some questions for instance, what are their interactions with the order-takers? After they place orders, what are they doing?

For more on this, click here