Oracle Bare Metal Cloud: IBM Cognitive Direct to Consumer Solution

Editor's Notes

• #5: How to grow the business by remaining profitable and competitive in the marketplace is the top concern of DTC marketers. Recognizing these challenges and opportunities, our team launched the initiative of developing a modern version of DTC solution with the goal to provide marketers with an intelligent and targeted approach to sell more and better products to customers while realizing more profit and sustainable growth. Visibility is the core focus of our solution, and the primary components of our 360 degree near real-time visibility include Street Price, Social demographics, social sentiment analysis. By leveraging Watson and our cognitive capabilities, we can translate data from all different dimensions into business intelligence which helps to answer questions such as what should I sell to whom at what price. The implication and impact extends beyond marketing; for instance supply chain and operations management. The idea to build on top of the existing eCommerce applications such as CRM, PIM and other ERP applications, add intelligence converted from structured and unstructured data, and use Watson and other cognitive capabilities such as advanced image analytics as an orchestrator to provide 360 degree near real time visibility of the customers and the market, to accomplish the sounds simple but super challenging goal of knowing what to sell to whom at what price. Our Street Price use case that is highlighted here includes the real time price of products that are sold at the retail level, social demographics of various locations (currently around 15 cities within the state of CA, scalable to the entire nation), social sentiment analysis which is a sample of data from Twitter which was annotated and parsed by WEX to calculate the sentiment score consumers have towards the targeted brands of our study; and the possibility of data is unlimited, for instance sales data from manufacturers, credit card data that IBM owns, etc. The richer the data, the accurate the insights.
• #6: I think we are familiar with some of the core cognitive technologies that IBM owns which are shown on the left hand side. The reason that they are listed here is because they can be incorporated in our use case development to drive business value. When we build a solution, what we always need to keep in mind is what tools to use to solve what type of problems. The problem in our case is knowledge and visibility; brands/manufacturers need to know their customer (who they are, where they are, what they need and how they feel about the products offered to them); they also need deep knowledge of the market, who they are competing with and what the competitors are offering, regulation and compliance standards, what is driving and influencing the market ,etc. Last but not least, manufacturers need to know themselves very well. Many large corporations suffer from lacking visibility to their operations; for instance our client of study doesn’t know how much inventory they have at a certain time, hence they cannot commit to the right amount of orders, they are not sure if they have the enough resources to carry out their production plan, etc.. As Chinese strategist Sun Tzu said, “Know yourself and know your enemy, you will be forever victorious.”