When we think about best coffee house in the world, one of the names that strikes our mind is Starbucks. Starbucks is 40-year-old coffee house serving over 70 million customers per week and has around 25000 stores across the whole world. Fulfilling the need of such a huge customer base and managing so many stores is not a simple task, but Starbucks handles this very systematically using data. In recent years data has become a prime resource for most business to adapt to the changing requirements. Similarly, Starbucks uses its enormous customer database to understand customer needs, products updating, understand the right time to introduce new products, inventory management, deciding new store location and many more. What! new store location, yes you heard it right, we will understand how Starbucks use data to decide a store location. Starbucks uses GIS based market planning and business intelligent system called ATLAS to identify best location to open stores. GIS (Geographic Information System) is a framework for gathering, managing and analyzing the data (ESRI), and layers of analyzed information is applied on maps and 3D scenes. To open a store lot many factors are accounted, understanding target market, population density, customer demographics, traffic, customer drive time from home to store, sales impact on existing stores and many more. Data is extracted from different sources, some from government bodies like US census Bureau and most from private sectors like ESRI’s Business Analyst Desktop, Starbucks own customer database. Apart from this, the retail location’s physical information that includes both internal and external qualities, surrounding landscapes, condition of structure, availability of parking space, visibility from street and many similar features are collected through local partners and even competitor’s information is extracted from various sources, their locations, number of competitors and their business concepts. Further Social media data helps to understand customer behavior, feedback, and their desire to revisit to store again. Field local partners help to locate target areas within city and the best available data collected from different sources are layered over that particular target areas and after analyzing new market, local partners decide the best store location among total target areas which brings in a better success rate.
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