In-Store Customer Journey Tracking: Can You Really Do This?

When I describe Digital Mortar to folks, the most common reaction I get is: “Can you really do this?” Depending on their level of experience in the field, that question has one of two meetings. If they haven’t used existing in-store customer tracking solutions, the question generally means: is the technology practical and is it actually OK to use it (i.e. does it violate privacy policies)? If they have experience with existing in-store customer tracking solutions what they mean is: “does your stuff actually work [...]

By | April 12th, 2017|Gary's Posts, Retail Analytics, Uncategorized|0 Comments
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Frictionless Competition and the Surprising Monopolization of the Internet

In the last few months I’ve been spending quite a bit of time thinking about the challenges in physical retail – stores. I’m going to be talking much more about that in the months to come, but thinking about the challenges in physical retail and whether and to what extent digital techniques might help, I’ve also had to think about why digital retail has evolved the way it has. There’s no doubt that digital has disrupted and hurt traditional retail. But it’s a mistake to [...]

By | November 7th, 2016|Gary's Posts, Retail Analytics, Uncategorized|0 Comments
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Digital Transformation and the Reverse Hierarchy of Understanding

Why is it so hard for the traditional enterprise to do digital well? That’s the question that lurks at the heart of every digital transformation discussion. After all, there’s plenty of evidence that digital can be done well. No one looks at the myriad FinTech, social, and ecommerce companies that are born digital and says “Why can’t they do digital well?” When digital is in your DNA it seems perfectly manageable. Of course, mastering any complex and competitive field is going to be a challenge. [...]

By | November 5th, 2016|Gary's Posts, Uncategorized|0 Comments
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Big Data Forecasting

Forecasting is a foundational activity in analytics and is a fundamental part of everyone’s personal mental calculus. At the simplest level, we live and work constantly using the most basic forecasting assumption – that everything will stay the same. And even though people will throw around aphorisms of the “one constant is change” sort, the assumption that things will stay largely the same is far more often true. The keyword in that sentence, though, is “largely”. Because if things mostly do stay the same, they [...]

By | November 3rd, 2016|Uncategorized|0 Comments
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Building Analytics Culture – One Decision at a Time

In my last post, I argued that much of what passes for “building culture” in corporate America is worthless. It’s all about talk. And whether that talk is about diversity, ethics or analytics, it’s equally arid. Because you don’t build culture by talking. You build culture though actions. By doing things right (or wrong if that’s the kind of culture you want). Not only are words not effective in building culture, they can be positively toxic. When words and actions don’t align, the dishonesty casts [...]

By | November 1st, 2016|Uncategorized|0 Comments
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Practical Steps to Building an Analytics Culture

Building an analytics culture in the enterprise is incredibly important. It’s far more important than any single capability, technology or technique. But building culture isn’t easy. You can’t buy it. You can’t proclaim it. You can’t implement it. There is, of course, a vast literature on building culture in the enterprise. But if the clumsy, heavy-handed, thoroughly useless attempts to “build culture” that I’ve witnessed over the course of my working life are any evidence, that body of literature is nearly useless. Here’s one thing [...]

By | October 28th, 2016|Uncategorized|0 Comments
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