Technology has enriched the overall customer experience. As a result, today’s leading fashion houses are looking at several ways to utilize emerging analytical technologies in fashion retail today. Let’s look at some of the ways this is happening today.

Digital Marketing and Social Media Analytics

Digital marketing analytics expenses increased by 60% in 2015 as branding and advertising businesses boomed. Social media and online advertising on mobile will continue to grow as integration of offline and online customer experience is on the rise. This in turn, has increased consumer brands’ ability to digitally influence customers and digitally empowered customers’ ability to influence brand image and value.

Cross-selling and upselling through Personalization

Owing to advancements in technology combined with the avalanche of data available today, enterprises across industries are leveraging inexpensive technologies such as Hadoop to analyze huge amounts of customer data, understand patterns and subsequently personalize their offers to their customers. This in turn helps them out-think and out-do the competition. “More data storytelling equals more engagement”. A leading Indian retailer boosted category growth by 50% with tailored campaigns based on affinity analysis, cross promotion between categories like kids, baby world and toys. Strategic customer segmentation enabled the business to drive a consistent marketing strategy across all concepts. Customer acquisition, retention campaigns and maximization strategies enabled increase in customer engagement and loyalty. By understanding customer attitudes, their purchase behavior and identifying fashion trends, they make smarter marketing decisions. Sales in select categories grew by 92% with targeted campaigns, using models like Market Basket Analysis, K-Means, Churn and Propensity. Read more in Gartner report on Self Service and Advanced Analytics.

Predicting future trends of fashion styles

Analytics is helping retailers aggregate fashion trends and sales information from a wide variety of sources around the globe—from retail sites, social media, designer runway reports, and blogs covering trends—and making it accessible in real time –  across menswear, women’s wear, children’s apparel, accessories, and beauty. In addition to the ability to combine both internal and external data sources, users now have access to more context for their data, which ultimately leads to more insights and better decisions.

Managing seasonal fluctuations

Fashion retailers often struggle to quickly address seasonal fluctuations and capitalize on unexpected opportunities. A lot of competitive advantage is to be gained in innovations that help retailers get the best bang for their buck, while maintaining customer loyalty. With the right real-time insights, retailers can shorten seasonal cycles to meet changing customer preferences. This in turn, can help negate surprises in customer demand and minimize losses. By using analytics, fashion retailers can have more flexibility in their supply chain responsiveness. Greater precision with in-season control can also be enabled by using modern analytics solutions to derive insights and optimize the 5Ps – product, promotion, pricing, placement, and people.

IoT devices in the fitness segment

While health and wellness have always been popular, it has become a trendy lifestyle choice for many over the past few years, driven by wearable technology. Smart technology is embedded into clothing, sportswear shoes, and trackers. The large amount of information obtained from these connected sensors when combined with contextual data can result in highly useful and interesting insights for consumers. Tracking the number of steps taken each day and heart rate, monitoring blood glucose levels, telemetry, and weight are just a few examples of data that consumers can obtain from their wearable devices. Consumers have started responding to such performance feedback and analytics from wearable fitness devices, if that’ll help them lead an active and healthy lifestyle. By using beacons and real-time analytics, retailers can create innovative engagement campaigns to further enhance the lifestyle choices that their consumers make, boosting loyalty as a result.

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Manthan’s ready to use, cloud based analytics solutions are designed to address the unique business processes and nuances of the fashion industry. Leading retailers across the globe use Manthan’s advanced and predictive analytics capabilities to improve decision making, accuracy, speed and impact on all aspects of the business, from customer experience to merchandising optimization, operational effectiveness and multi-channel business orchestration. Read more on how your business can stay ahead of the top 5 trends in Fashion retailing. *https://www.audiense.com/steal-their-style-7-fashion-brands-bringing-life-to-their-digital-marketing/

Across retail, technology is helping push innovation and business competition to greater extents than seen earlier. The use of analytical platforms that are geared towards multi-structured data sources is helping drive faster and almost real-time customer responsiveness. App-like interfaces are designed to be simple, contextual and intuitive for problem-solving by an average non-technical user. As a result, we are seeing a greater adoption of mobility in the use of analytical technology in-store, at the location, or even customer-facing apps. Fashion retailers, in particular, are diving deep into technology that enables supply chain responsiveness, visibility, and collaboration. Let’s look at some of the ways improved analytics is driving business innovation in the fashion industry.

Customer Centric Merchandising:

Greater ability to integrate customer insights into product preferences, geo-demographic variations, a better understanding of lifestyle and psychographic drivers of sale – all now manageable at granularity and speed.

Demand-side:

Better management of product lifecycle using better forecasting techniques, more diverse data sources like digital and social data in demand analysis, advanced algorithms for predicting likely change in demand.

Supply execution:

Ability to shorten the business and seasonal cycles to meet changing customer preferences, enabling more flexible supply chain responsiveness, greater precision in in-season control by optimizing 5Ps and minimizing losses.

Store Operations and Customer experience:

Better in-store customer experience with analytics-guided selling and relevant customer engagement, greater real-time integration of multi-channel demand fulfillment needs, the personalized recommendation at the point of sale for loyal customers.

Pricing:

Better in-season control for full price sales, better markdown optimization, price consistency across channels, price control in promotional periods.

Promotional analysis:

Better execution of in-season activation programs/campaigns, the ability to deliver personalized communications on digital devices based on preference, advanced segmentation, history, geo-location etc.

Customer advocacy:

Ability to generate insights from customer advocacy programs, fashion ambassadors, activation programs etc, to enable a deeper understanding of demand, emerging trends & topics, responsiveness in digital engagement.

Digital shopping tools:

Virtual shopping assistants providing product recommendations based on preferences, customer inputs, and history, tools that help to create personal profiles, fitting sizes, and preferences in relation to occasions.

Subscription models:

Ability to try and buy new products, targeting the right offers to specific customer profiles, fashion expert recommendations in a box.

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With Manthan Retail Analytics, fashion businesses can:

• Optimize buying, selling, pricing, assortment, placement.
• Manage product lifecycle pricing, sell-through and optimize markdowns.
• Identify top-sellers to buy and promote better.
• Anticipate and address out-of-stock before sales loss.
• Compare sales, margins, return rates by vendor/products.

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