Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

You’re going to have to get used to it: data is everywhere, we contribute to it constantly, and it has a huge impact on the retail industry. In fact, 80-90 percent  of all the data in the world was created in just the last two years. Big data is generally portrayed as having all the solutions to many of the biggest issues in retail (as long as it is mined and utilized correctly), but it still has a lot of quirks to work out.

A big chunk of the problem with big data comes down to how it’s defined. There are dozens of different takes on it, but let’s discuss it as the rapid increase of the creation of diverse and quickly transforming data through multiple channels that must be processed in innovative and strategic ways.

Global retail sales should reach $3 trillion this year, and big data has the potential to unlock a larger slice of the market share pie for retailers. How? Well, that’s the interesting part....

Online sales in the U.S. are expected to hit another record this holiday season, but spending growth will be slower than in previous years, according to one researcher.

Forrester Research predicts that consumers will spent $89 billion shopping online during the holiday season this year, an increase of 13% from the same period a year earlier. That's down from 15% year-over-year growth in 2013....