Earlier this month, Apparel Magazine published a piece contributed by Susan Olivier, our 
VP of Consumer Goods & Retail. It’s no secret that retailers are struggling to adapt to new realities concerning their brick-and-mortar stores, and major brands are being challenged to maintain connections with their customers amidst a hyper-competitive environment. The answers might be found within the huge amount of consumer data available to retailers and fashion brands. The question is: how do brands turn ‘big data’ into intelligence they can use?
Olivier explains:
“Big data certainly provides strategic value, yet without the tools to access and analyze it, brands risk a trial-and-error process that can hurt their credibility and sales. Big data is also increasingly unstructured – from Twitter feeds and Pinterest to consumer shopping behavior. And it’s not just what they buy, but what they abandon in online shopping carts — even what they look at but don’t select. Brands and retailers need to use a modern solution that directly captures the voice of the consumer, collects information from both structured and unstructured sources, organizes it into meaningful relationships, and displays the results in visually intuitive dashboards.”
There are myriad opportunities for fashion brands and retailers to hear what their customers prefer, but they need to know how to listen, and then need a platform for turning gained insights into action. Olivier goes on to explain how retailers like TopShop and Macy’s have successfully discovered insights in consumer data that have led them to redesign their in-store and ecommerce shopping experiences. The entire article provides great insights into the future of retail and apparel, and we encourage everyone to check it out at the Apparel Magazine website. To learn more about Dassault Systèmes’ work with apparel brands like Fossil and Mammut Sports Group, visit our Consumer Goods & Retail homepage.
All of the growth opportunities described by Olivier – discovering insights from customer data, bringing products to market faster with collaborative 3D design, etc. – can only be realized by businesses that embrace a business platform to transform the way their organization operates. To hear directly from companies that have made business platforms ‘the operating system of their enterprise,’ register to attend our 3DEXPERIENCE FORUM, Oct. 16-18, in Hollywood, Florida.
