Wednesday, July 23, 2014

The Blog Assignment – Using SNA in Retail


Social Network Analysis (SNA) is a powerful and crucial tool to detect social relationships between customers. It is a useful tool to measure the number of connections in different degree as well as in different characters, which is quite important in profiles for the right person’s choice. 

From many researches, we know most purchasing decisions (70%) are a result of recommendations made by the customer’s close social environment, less advertising or marketing campaigns.


The opinion leaders in social network are not the one with most relationships to other customers, but the one who have strongest influence in the social network. The influence is refer to purchase of a specific products and influence on loyalty and churn. Studies have shown that opinion leaders might influence from 10 to 100 other people belonging to their social network at buying products specific recommended by the influencers.

The Problem/Challenge
Customers are always the most important factor in a successful business. It is extremely important to know different customer segment and understand customer behaviors.
l   Who is the most influence customer
l   Who is the most valuable customer
l   How to acquire loyalty customer
l   How to improve lifetime valuable customer

Data needed
To analyze the relationship between different customers, I want to know the questions below:
l   Which product you bought in last month?
l   Who influenced you to buy this product?
l   Will you plan to buy other product in the coming month?
l   What is the main issue you care about, such as design, price, service…?

Measurements
l   Use the network degree to the influence question, we can figure out the one with highest degree refers to the one with more influence, and work out the opinion leaders.
l   Use the network density to define the customer segmentation and customer features.
l   Use the distance analysis to know the influencer’s impact.

What SNA can help
The Social network analysis could help organizations to explore and understand the social structure of their customer base. And are used widely in retail industry to help following points:
l   Optimizing product marketing campaigns
l   Concentrate on customer segmentation
l   Figure out product recommendation
l   Loyalty programming management
l   Help for churn management
l   Foresee the trends and spot business opportunities

SNA is the solution to help marketing department to detect the influencer, help selecting the influence customers for a particular product, and help retailers clear about customer segmentation and their related products. Finally reach the aim to stimulate the sales and increase revenue.


1 comment:

Christopher Tunnard said...

Good idea, and a good attempt at using SNA to help focus promotional efforts. You may not have realized this, but you're actually describing a 2-mode network: customers and their purchases, using their attributes to segment them.