How Mining Data During The Great Recession Drove Success for 3M

[jrineakter]

How Mining Data During The Great Recession Drove Success for 3M.
data.world CEO and Co-Founder Brett Hurt is sharing his thoughts on the theme of “People + Data” on a weekly basis in advance of our September 22 data.world fall summit.

As we discussed in last week’s post, Learning the Lessons of Data Analytics in the Dot-Com Bust ‘Classroom, I’ve had a long career in data and analytics, from a conceptual introduction as a child, to the walks across hot coals that were the dot-com bust at Coremetrics and later the Great Recession at Bazaarvoice. While there’s satisfaction in pioneering new techniques at any time, doing so in such moments of great challenge is when you create history. And once again, we find ourselves in history-making times.

So let’s fast forward from my Coremetrics’ years to my co-founding Bazaarvoice in 2005, an era when booming eCommerce was really taking on the contours we’re now so familiar with. Amazon.com had survived and was now thriving. Overall, eCommerce was growing at 25% and reached $109 billion that year. Everyone began to want in on the action, from traditional retailers like Walmart and others going online to try and keep up with the future that Amazon was defining, to brands endeavoring to figure out how to leverage their own websites to establish a direct relationship with customers.

But then the Great Recession hit and it was panic time all over again. It was the moment when we all learned about the so-called “derivatives” captured in Michael Lewis’ famous denmark whatsapp number data book (and later film) The Big Short. It looked like the exotic and fast-evaporating mortgage-backed security instruments could tank our entire economy, and the investment banking giant Lehman Brothers was the first to fall in 2008. As the nation’s GDP fell by more than 4 percent, we implemented a six-month hiring freeze at Bazaarvoice, as we just didn’t know how bad it would get.

Was this Great Recession going to lead to another Great Depression?

Pioneering Data and Analytics
We quickly overcame our fears and got to work. One of our customers that became a true data and analytics pioneer during this period was the iconic company 3M, perhaps most famous for inventing the Post-it® Note. 3M today has over 60,000 products and 30 distinct brands.

One of the most effective aspects of Bazaarvoice’s business model was – and is – that branded websites, like Post-it.com, could collect a lot of customer reviews via our social commerce platform. For example, this Post-it® Note’s “Supernova Neon” product has a 4.9-star rating and 432 reviews there as of this writing. These authentic customer reviews could then be syndicated to retailer websites like Walmart.com, OfficeDepot.com, Staples.com, and others to drive channel sales, leading to a great ROI (return on investment).