Beyond Guesswork: Tailoring Your Valentine’s Offerings to Customer Insights

Blog / Beyond Guesswork: Tailoring Your Valentine’s Offerings to Customer Insights

Retail is an unforgiving battlefield, and the rules of engagement are constantly changing. To thrive, retailers must not just adapt to change; they must anticipate and shape it. They must understand their customers deeply and engage with them in new and innovative ways.  Here’s how you, as a retailer in 2024, should harness AI to tap into consumer insights effectively.

✅ Break Data Silos: Start by dismantling the barriers between departments to create a comprehensive view of enterprise data. 

From marketing to sales to operations and manufacturing, each stream offers valuable insights. Consolidating these data points is the first step towards a holistic understanding of your business and customers. 

While simply pooling this data won’t immediately unlock insights, it sets the stage for advanced analytics with AI and Gen AI, enabling you to glean deeper, actionable insights.

✅ Your Demand Plans Demand External Datasets: To truly understand and anticipate customer needs, you need to look beyond your internal data. 

Incorporate external datasets – like market trends, economic indicators, and weather patterns – into your demand planning. This approach allows you to react to changes and anticipate and prepare for them, ensuring you meet your customers’ needs more accurately and efficiently.

For example, a company using Planning in a Box will experience a significant enhancement compared to what they’re used to with their existing SAP IBP. Typically, SAP IBP provides robust internal data analysis, but it lacks the capability to integrate and interpret external market dynamics seamlessly.

Planning in a Box fills this gap by merging internal data with external factors like social trends, economic shifts, and weather patterns. Planners see a more comprehensive, predictive view of demand, something they wouldn’t typically get from SAP IBP alone.

✅ Swap monthly inventory calls for real-time adjustments: Gone are the days of monthly stock checks and static inventory levels.

In 2024, real-time inventory optimization is key. This means knowing what you have, what you need, and where you need it at any given moment. Technologies such as event-driven automation for real-time inventory tracking ensure that your stock levels are dynamic, responsive, and always in line with current demand.

✅ Use AI to your advantage 

Embrace technologies like Shelf Checking AI, which uses imagery to automatically track items on store shelves. This ensures your inventory is accurate and provides insights into which products are popular, how quickly they’re moving, and when to reorder. 

To deeply understand your consumers, you need to leverage every piece of data they provide. Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) collect and organize all customer data into a single, comprehensive customer profile. Pair this with BigQuery Data Clean Rooms, and you have a powerful combination that offers deep consumer insights and enhances marketing analytics. This means you can tailor your offerings, personalize your marketing, and engage with your customers in ways that resonate deeply and drive loyalty.

Where does Pluto7 come in?

As a Google Cloud Premier Partner, Pluto7 specializes in solving supply chain challenges for leaders like ABInBev and Levi’s. We do this with our three interconnected decision intelligence platforms (CX Sense for demand sensing and customer insights, Planning in a Box for inventory optimization, and Konnect Manufacturing for improving manufacturing efficiency), delivering insightful, actionable intelligence across your supply chain.

Not Your Typical Planning Software

Right now, there’s no shortage of planning platforms, and terms like ‘AI’ and ‘Gen AI’ are liberally sprinkled across every tech solution slide deck. As a retailer, you’re likely already invested in one of these platforms, having paid a premium with the hope of revolutionizing your supply chain and inventory management. Yet, you find yourself grappling with the same issues: increasing inventory carry-over costs, margins that don’t seem to improve, and a lack of clear, actionable insights.

This is precisely where Pluto7 comes in. Unlike other solutions that promise the world but deliver an atlas, we focus on delivering targeted, impactful results. We understand the frustration of investing in expensive platforms only to see minimal impact. That’s why our platforms are cost-effective and designed to quickly address your most pressing challenges. 

To see how we can help tackle specific challenges, such as accurately sensing the demand for seasonal peaks like Valentine’s Day, improving store inventory turnover, or implementing dynamic pricing strategies on your e-commerce site, reach out for a demo.