Of course everyone has heard all the hype on big data and how it can help business’ become more successful. But have you thought about the different types of big data? How the different types of data can support different initiatives within your business?

Structured versus unstructured data in retail is a key topic to first understand in order to create a successful plan. Structured data is data that sits in a database, a file, or a spreadsheet. It is generally organized and formatted. In retail, this data can be point-of-sale data, inventory, product hierarchies, ect. Unstructured data does not have a specific format. It can be customer reviews, tweets, pictures, and even hashtags.

So now that you know what structured versus unstructured data in retail is, let’s talk about how to use it. Customer reviews are a great way to understand why a certain product is or isn’t working. Word clouds are a tool to visualize large amounts of customer reviews. Finding key words that are continuously being used can give insight in to product defects. For example, if ‘fits small’ is frequently used then you can be proactive by adding this to the product description or above the size selection. This will reduce customer returns and money lost on shipping fees.

Unstructured data can also be analyzed for sentiment analysis. This gives insight in to whether the customer’s response is positive, negative, or neutral. A great example of this is being able to analyze your customer’s twitter responses. Let’s say you post a tweet with products you are thinking about buying for your spring line and your brands hashtag. This enables retailers to understand your customers’ response before you even buy the product. This technique can also be used in-season and give insight to merchants on areas of opportunity or risk so that open to buy can be managed. Break down the silos between merchandising and marketing and enhance collaboration.

It doesn’t take a data scientist to use unstructured data analytical techniques either. If you’re looking to use unstructured data in your business process, check out more information on SAS Visual Analytics. Also, take a look at the 2015 Forrester Wave report where SAS was named a leader in Big Data Predictive Analytics Solutions.