Creating a consumer-centric value chain through digital transformation

Within businesses, supply chain professionals are under constant pressure to improve efficiency. Competition continues to increase and customer expectations are at an all-time high. Previously, manufacturers focused on their product and its features, not on whether it was in sync with the needs of the consumer. With the rise of digital analytics, however, the consumer has taken the reins, changing the ballgame for companies that now have to change their product strategies so they’re more about us, the consumer, than them, the producer.

But how do they achieve this?

Craft a strategy for the digital age

In this customer-led world, a successful customer strategy is key – one that uses sophisticated data analytics tools, massive amounts of rich customer data, and an agile, test-and-learn technique for developing valuable new product proposals. Businesses need to partner with their customers to co-create products and services that align with those customers’ needs.

Creating a winning customer strategy can be nerve-wracking when digital disruption has you worried about how to stay relevant to your customers, stay ahead of the competition, and stay profitable in highly volatile markets. These concerns can be assuaged by customer journey mapping and user experience design, which are crucial for implementing customer-centric changes. These activities should be strengthened by training, technology, innovation, and design thinking, which help businesses adopt cross-functional, customer-centric operating models and enjoy the economic and reputational rewards of an enhanced customer experience.

Improve your customer experience

Investing in customer experience enhancement can produce a substantial competitive advantage. Leading consumer brands achieve twice as much revenue growth as their competitors by designing a better customer experience that inspires brand loyalty.

Building an effective customer experience through calculated vision and design will pave the way for a successful transformation. This can be achieved through:

• Customer experience analytics that bring the voice of the customer into the boardroom, providing perspective and enabling leaders to assess returns. Collecting customer feedback using surveys and focus groups helps you accomplish this by providing a more unified understanding of customer preferences and observed behavior. You will be able to forecast customer trends with greater accuracy and devise more effective sales, marketing, and customer service processes.
• Embracing design thinking to craft engaging customer experiences. Add the concept of customer-led “service design” to your product design process – a complete framework that enables you to see how clients and prospects connect with your brand and product, and shows all the various stages customers experience as they interact with your online channels, from awareness to consideration to purchase.

Digitally integrate your marketing, sales, and service

Traditional companies need to transform marketing, sales, and service silos into an integrated process for attracting, acquiring, and engaging customers – all seamlessly connected to agile supply chain operations.

• Transform marketing: Recognize your customers' needs and form marketing strategies according to those needs. Sophisticated analytics and intelligent use of customer data will align your marketing efforts with fact-based insights.
• Transform sales: Offline sales channels need to be transformed, digitized, and then fully integrated with your purely digital channels. Your sales operations need to move away from the product-centric approach towards consumer-centric.
• Omni-channel integration: Multi-channel customer contact for each transaction is now the norm. Customers favor mobile channels now, so your business should have a mobile channel strategy that offers a more personalized experience.

Conclusion

By implementing customer-centricity with a focus on the economics of the customer experience, you can drive profitable growth, create actionable insights and strategies for customer focus, and operationalize them. Use digital technology to create strong market intelligence and opportunities for personalized consumer interactions.

Digital BI and analytics powered by machine learning can go a long way towards realizing your consumer-centric approach to product development, and can be leveraged into strategic decisions that improve business performance, profitability, and customer relationships. To learn more, please contact Visionet Systems.

Top new features in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations

Microsoft has added many new features to Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations that will enable you to transform your business faster.

Real-time intelligence and insights into business data will help you proactively manage and grow your business globally. The common data service (CDS) integrates customer engagement applications across the Dynamics 365 portfolio of products, the built-in back-end Finance and Operations module, and core functionality like finance, retail, manufacturing enhancement, and extensible global support.

1. Productivity and Usability

Usability enhancements will enable business users to view, filter, and save optimized views of data, improving productivity on daily tasks. Other enhancements will improve end-user performance for on-hand inventory reporting, master planning, consolidation of planned orders, and warehouse operations. Customers will also be able perform unassisted upgrades using upgrade automation.

2. Personalization

Personalization improvements will enable users to remove columns from grids, add fields, and track additional information in the system by creating custom fields to tailor the application to fit their business. Business users will be able to create, save, and share multiple optimized views that can be targeted for certain user groups or business tasks. Saved views will greatly simplify the user experience and improve user productivity.

With WYSIWYG capabilities, you will have a better user experience and will no longer have to repeatedly exit and then re-enter personalization mode to make all the desired form modifications.

3. Intelligence and Insights

Microsoft continues to improve extended analytical workspaces, and soon you will be able to personalize dashboards by combining data from Finance and Operations and other systems with rich visualizations.

With “bring your own database” (BYOD) functionality, users can create, save, and share multiple optimized views that can be targeted for user groups or business tasks. It also enables customization of analytical workspaces.

Companies prefer seeing their data in real time to enable faster decision making instead of relying on overnight scheduled refreshes. Real-time Power BI visibility lets you pin Power BI dashboards with real-time data to Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations. Some data, like from a Salesforce or Market content pack, is automatically refreshed for you. If you use a live connection or DirectQuery, the data will be updated automatically.

4. Connected Ecosystem

Microsoft has created an ecosystem of products that are seamlessly integrated with Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations. With the Data Management workspace, you will be able to configure multiple data sources. With CDS, you will have more than 200 out-of-the-box data sources that use advanced EDI capabilities to integrate with practically anything.

The Talent Management app leverages the capabilities of Office 365, Skype, and LinkedIn to attract talent. Azure Machine Learning identifies qualified candidates by comparing their profiles to your job requirements. Skype Interviews makes interviews more collaborative by adding a shared whiteboard and coding environment for real-time technical exercises. Features like onboarding support, benefits, workforce, and organizational management capabilities make Talent a complete “hire-to-fire” module.

Deeper integration provides a more seamless transition between the Talent app and Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations.

The Field Services module has become more proactive. It engages customers, optimizes resources, and uses a more interactive and adaptable platform. It uses the IoT to proactively detect and create alerts and orders, with the deep Finance and Operations integration and work order data to be pushed to sales. It offers warehouse and purchase orders, invoice integration, and also enables account, product, and pricelist master data integration.

Project Service includes adjustments to approved time, expense, and journal lines, support for multiple time units on a single price list, and configuring a unit of time for estimating work on project tasks.

5. Global Capabilities

Microsoft’s core capabilities keep improving and its enhanced features enable businesses to meet their requirements effectively.

Enterprise credit management capabilities automate credit management processes for accounting and finance professionals to proactively suggest credit control activities that improve cash flow, reduce bad debts, and provide new account control management.

With dual currency, the reporting currency becomes a secondary currency and tracks the reporting currency in fixed assets, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, and bank management.

Finance and accounting professionals use revenue recognition capabilities to automate compliance with IFRS and ASC 606 financial reporting standards.

6. Regulatory and Electronic Reporting

Every country has their own taxes and regulations. ERP systems must meet these local requirements, so Microsoft keeps adding localization features into Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations.

Regulatory Services will provide functionality that can be integrated with any business application. This service allows developers building applications to focus on their core functionality rather than worrying about meeting the increasing number of legal requirements around the globe. Enhanced configurability features let partners and customers create extensions and customizations without coding. For example, they can configure the tax currency in tax documents to help customers with multiple branches in different countries.

In accordance with the legal requirements of various countries and regions, Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations supports formats for both incoming and outgoing electronic documents. Because you configure formats instead of code, creating electronic documents is faster and easier. Forms like Vendor Check, Customer Sales Invoice, and Customer Purchase Order can be configured without involving a developer.

The update also adds new features like automatic comparison of electronic reporting format executions with baselines for automatic test capabilities. Relative paths in electronic reporting formulas allow quick remapping of the format if you need to switch to another data entity or XML node with a similar structure.

7. Optimization Advisor

Incorrectly configuring a module can adversely affect system performance and business operations. The correctness, completeness, and cleanliness of your business data also affects system performance, your organization's decision-making capabilities, and employee productivity.

The Optimization Advisor workspace is a tool that lets power users, business analysts, functional consultants, and IT support functions identify issues in module configuration and business data. Optimization Advisor suggests best practices for module configuration and identifies business data that is obsolete or incorrect.

Optimization Advisor periodically runs a set of best practice rules. When a violation is detected, an optimization opportunity is generated and appears in the Optimization Advisor workspace. A user can take corrective action directly from the Optimization Advisor workspace.

8. Distributed Order Management

Distributed Order Management (DOM) lets retailers take advantage of intelligent algorithms to optimize order fulfillment operations across their enterprise. DOM automatically determines the best possible fulfillment location across warehouses, distribution centers, or even stores based on user-definable profiles containing rules, scope, and delivery methods. Enhanced order fulfillment capabilities within Retail Modern POS and Cloud POS help turn each retail location into a micro-warehouse, ensuring that orders are filled as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible.

9. Vendor Collaboration

The Vendor Collaboration module is targeted at vendors who don't have electronic data interchange (EDI) integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations. It lets vendors work with purchase orders (POs), invoices, consignment inventory information, and requests for quotation (RFQs), and also lets them access parts of their vendor master data. Notable features of this module include:

• Working with RFQs
• Vendor management, security, and compliance settings
• Working with POs (sending, confirming, changing, cancelling)
• PO status and version information
• Consignment inventory

10. Catch Weight Product Processing

This functionality will provide support for using catch weight products as part of warehouse management processes. Catch weight products are often used in industries like the food industry where products can vary slightly by weight, size, or both. Catch weight products use two units of measure — an inventory unit (kilograms) and a catch weight unit (boxes).

Within warehouse management processes, catch weight products can be handled in different units like pallets and boxes. For example, business processes can be granularly defined to perform inbound weighing on a per-pallet level and capture the outbound sales process during picking or packing according to catch weight quantity (boxes).

Conclusion

The features mentioned in this post aren’t all that Microsoft offers. Microsoft’s roadmap for new releases includes many other features designed to meet the growing demands of business users, and they will continue to expand their products’ integration capabilities to support these users’ diverse needs and specialized niches.

This article is a part of our Dynamics 365 blog series that keeps companies updated about the latest developments in the world of tech. For further information on Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, please contact Visionet Systems today.

Reference: https://www.visionetsystems.com/blog/top-new-features-dynamics-365-finance-and-operations

Top new features in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations

Microsoft has added many new features to Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations that will enable you to transform your business faster.

Real-time intelligence and insights into business data will help you proactively manage and grow your business globally. The common data service (CDS) integrates customer engagement applications across the Dynamics 365 portfolio of products, the built-in back-end Finance and Operations module, and core functionality like finance, retail, manufacturing enhancement, and extensible global support.

1. Productivity and Usability

Usability enhancements will enable business users to view, filter, and save optimized views of data, improving productivity on daily tasks. Other enhancements will improve end-user performance for on-hand inventory reporting, master planning, consolidation of planned orders, and warehouse operations. Customers will also be able perform unassisted upgrades using upgrade automation.

2. Personalization

Personalization improvements will enable users to remove columns from grids, add fields, and track additional information in the system by creating custom fields to tailor the application to fit their business. Business users will be able to create, save, and share multiple optimized views that can be targeted for certain user groups or business tasks. Saved views will greatly simplify the user experience and improve user productivity.

With WYSIWYG capabilities, you will have a better user experience and will no longer have to repeatedly exit and then re-enter personalization mode to make all the desired form modifications.

3. Intelligence and Insights

Microsoft continues to improve extended analytical workspaces, and soon you will be able to personalize dashboards by combining data from Finance and Operations and other systems with rich visualizations.

With “bring your own database” (BYOD) functionality, users can create, save, and share multiple optimized views that can be targeted for user groups or business tasks. It also enables customization of analytical workspaces.

Companies prefer seeing their data in real time to enable faster decision making instead of relying on overnight scheduled refreshes. Real-time Power BI visibility lets you pin Power BI dashboards with real-time data to Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations. Some data, like from a Salesforce or Market content pack, is automatically refreshed for you. If you use a live connection or DirectQuery, the data will be updated automatically.

4. Connected Ecosystem

Microsoft has created an ecosystem of products that are seamlessly integrated with Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations. With the Data Management workspace, you will be able to configure multiple data sources. With CDS, you will have more than 200 out-of-the-box data sources that use advanced EDI capabilities to integrate with practically anything.

The Talent Management app leverages the capabilities of Office 365, Skype, and LinkedIn to attract talent. Azure Machine Learning identifies qualified candidates by comparing their profiles to your job requirements. Skype Interviews makes interviews more collaborative by adding a shared whiteboard and coding environment for real-time technical exercises. Features like onboarding support, benefits, workforce, and organizational management capabilities make Talent a complete “hire-to-fire” module.

Deeper integration provides a more seamless transition between the Talent app and Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations.

The Field Services module has become more proactive. It engages customers, optimizes resources, and uses a more interactive and adaptable platform. It uses the IoT to proactively detect and create alerts and orders, with the deep Finance and Operations integration and work order data to be pushed to sales. It offers warehouse and purchase orders, invoice integration, and also enables account, product, and pricelist master data integration.

Project Service includes adjustments to approved time, expense, and journal lines, support for multiple time units on a single price list, and configuring a unit of time for estimating work on project tasks.

5. Global Capabilities

Microsoft’s core capabilities keep improving and its enhanced features enable businesses to meet their requirements effectively.

Enterprise credit management capabilities automate credit management processes for accounting and finance professionals to proactively suggest credit control activities that improve cash flow, reduce bad debts, and provide new account control management.

With dual currency, the reporting currency becomes a secondary currency and tracks the reporting currency in fixed assets, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, and bank management.

Finance and accounting professionals use revenue recognition capabilities to automate compliance with IFRS and ASC 606 financial reporting standards.

6. Regulatory and Electronic Reporting

Every country has their own taxes and regulations. ERP systems must meet these local requirements, so Microsoft keeps adding localization features into Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations.

Regulatory Services will provide functionality that can be integrated with any business application. This service allows developers building applications to focus on their core functionality rather than worrying about meeting the increasing number of legal requirements around the globe. Enhanced configurability features let partners and customers create extensions and customizations without coding. For example, they can configure the tax currency in tax documents to help customers with multiple branches in different countries.

In accordance with the legal requirements of various countries and regions, Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations supports formats for both incoming and outgoing electronic documents. Because you configure formats instead of code, creating electronic documents is faster and easier. Forms like Vendor Check, Customer Sales Invoice, and Customer Purchase Order can be configured without involving a developer.

The update also adds new features like automatic comparison of electronic reporting format executions with baselines for automatic test capabilities. Relative paths in electronic reporting formulas allow quick remapping of the format if you need to switch to another data entity or XML node with a similar structure.

7. Optimization Advisor

Incorrectly configuring a module can adversely affect system performance and business operations. The correctness, completeness, and cleanliness of your business data also affects system performance, your organization's decision-making capabilities, and employee productivity.

The Optimization Advisor workspace is a tool that lets power users, business analysts, functional consultants, and IT support functions identify issues in module configuration and business data. Optimization Advisor suggests best practices for module configuration and identifies business data that is obsolete or incorrect.

Optimization Advisor periodically runs a set of best practice rules. When a violation is detected, an optimization opportunity is generated and appears in the Optimization Advisor workspace. A user can take corrective action directly from the Optimization Advisor workspace.

8. Distributed Order Management

Distributed Order Management (DOM) lets retailers take advantage of intelligent algorithms to optimize order fulfillment operations across their enterprise. DOM automatically determines the best possible fulfillment location across warehouses, distribution centers, or even stores based on user-definable profiles containing rules, scope, and delivery methods. Enhanced order fulfillment capabilities within Retail Modern POS and Cloud POS help turn each retail location into a micro-warehouse, ensuring that orders are filled as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible.

9. Vendor Collaboration

The Vendor Collaboration module is targeted at vendors who don't have electronic data interchange (EDI) integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations. It lets vendors work with purchase orders (POs), invoices, consignment inventory information, and requests for quotation (RFQs), and also lets them access parts of their vendor master data. Notable features of this module include:

• Working with RFQs
• Vendor management, security, and compliance settings
• Working with POs (sending, confirming, changing, cancelling)
• PO status and version information
• Consignment inventory

10. Catch Weight Product Processing

This functionality will provide support for using catch weight products as part of warehouse management processes. Catch weight products are often used in industries like the food industry where products can vary slightly by weight, size, or both. Catch weight products use two units of measure — an inventory unit (kilograms) and a catch weight unit (boxes).

Within warehouse management processes, catch weight products can be handled in different units like pallets and boxes. For example, business processes can be granularly defined to perform inbound weighing on a per-pallet level and capture the outbound sales process during picking or packing according to catch weight quantity (boxes).

Conclusion

The features mentioned in this post aren’t all that Microsoft offers. Microsoft’s roadmap for new releases includes many other features designed to meet the growing demands of business users, and they will continue to expand their products’ integration capabilities to support these users’ diverse needs and specialized niches.

This article is a part of our Dynamics 365 blog series that keeps companies updated about the latest developments in the world of tech. For further information on Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, please contact Visionet Systems today.

This blog is already published on Visionet’s blog

Creating an effective domestic production model for Fashion & Apparel

Fashion & Apparel makes up a small portion of US imports but contributes to a disproportionate amount of the tariffs collected by the United States government. As the White House continues to hint at an expansion of tariffs to include a wide range of consumer goods that includes apparel and footwear, heavy reliance on imports is a major risk for the industry.

Few Fashion & Apparel retailers and designers have the capacity to establish in-house production, and creating that capacity in a short period is no mean feat. However, moving away from full package sourcing and outsourcing specific manufacturing processes to US factories is a comparatively easier and more manageable change in production operations that the industry can still explore.

Apparel, footwear, and travel goods represent 6% of US imports, but they contribute to 51% of the tariffs collected by the United States government.

The benefits of a domestic outsourcing production model are obvious: shorter lead times, the flexibility of easier in-season reorders, faster store replenishment, collaborative product design, more direct and on-the-spot quality control, flexibility in production capacity, centralized materials requirement planning (MRP), easier material safety and reorder point management, and, of course, lower tariff costs only paid for material imports.

However, there are many challenges that need to be managed for a successful transition:

1. Establish strong domestic partnerships with contractors and factories 
   The single most important aspect is onboarding the right contractors and factories for serving your product lines and categories. Building strong partnerships is essential for securing consistent lead-time commitments from contractors and factories. This requires supply chain visibility by continuously and consistently sharing sales and demand plans of new product lines, reorder and replenishment forecasts, and contractors’ progress reports. It’s essential that you have a domestic production solution that supports such collaboration.


2. Define production control and material management processes
   If your organization relies entirely on full package sourcing, processes for MRP, material purchase, issuance, and consumption are non-existent. Therefore, you don’t have the skillset you need in-house to scale to domestic production. Implementing new processes should focus on recruiting and/or training the right internal resources and setting up IT systems capable of Fashion & Apparel MRP and production management.


3. Set up warehouse for domestic production
   Next, identify the warehouse that will serve the contractors’ and factories’ material requirements. The warehouse has to be located nearby to ensure faster material issuance lead times. Warehouse managers need to allocate floor space and implement efficient material receiving, put-away, picking, and shipping processes. Implementing a digital warehouse management system (WMS) capable of materials management is a must.



4. Establish CoE steering committee
   Collaborating between different departments to achieve the eventual goal of timely, cost efficient products loved by consumers requires a concerted effort controlled by a steering committee of stakeholders from product design, production control, planning, material management, and logistics & distribution.
5. 
   
6. Establishing a Center of Excellence (CoE) steering committee brings your efforts together and keeps your teams focused on their shared objectives. It ensures smooth collaboration with contractors and factories, and allows merchandizers to lead product line success across all sales channels.


Expanding your production operations network isn’t just an onshoring effort to bring production back to domestic markets. It involves taking a fresh look at organizing new process models. Use self-service portals for partners to provide the following capabilities:
• Sharing demand forecast insights
• Visibility to new product lines
• Collaborative sampling processes
• Factory-driven material consumption reporting
• Factory-driven progress reporting
• Sharing estimated capacity requirements for in-season replenishments
To minimize operational costs and maximize ROI, the CoE steering committee should focus on establishing a digital workforce using intelligent/robotic process automation (RPA/IPA). Here are some process areas they could focus on:
• Work order issuance
• Vendor invoicing
• Contractor and vendor onboarding
• Material issuance and allocation
• Material consumption journal entries
• Work order progress reporting
• Material reorders
HauteLogic by Visionet Systems is a comprehensive, ready-to-deploy fashion solution for collaborative domestic Fashion & Apparel sourcing management, with self-service portals for contractors and factories and complete MRP and production control processes that are fully integrated with WMS and retail POS operations. Visionet and HauteLogic provide a full scope of services for establishing a digital workforce by effectively implementing RPA/IPA to enhance Fashion & Apparel operations.
Please contact Visionet Systems today to discover how our complete range of solutions and services are the best choice for your current and future fashion management needs.
References
https://sourcingjournal.com/topics/trade/clothing-imports-trade-104481/ https://apparelmag.com/fashion-gears-trade-warhttps://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-07/sneakers-phones-won-t-escape-another-tariff-round-unscathedhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/asian-stocks-mixed-on-fears-of-more-us-tariffs-on-china/2018/09/10/55fce0c4-b4af-11e8-ae4f-2c1439c96d79_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.c898f1d82a28https://www.visionetsystems.com/webinar/building-digital-partner-ecosystem-logistics-supply-chain-and-tradinghttps://www.visionetsystems.com/webinar/enhancing-supply-chain-efficiency-using-virtual-robots

Delivering a Unified Shopping Experience through Omni-Channel Enablement

Picture this: a prospective customer discovers your brand, browses through your website, and is excited to learn that you offer online shopping. He finds something he likes, adds it to his online cart, and then decides to check out. Since it’s his first visit, he’s redirected to your registration page, where he spends a fair bit of time creating an account for your online store.

After finally making his account, an interruption forces your new customer to complete his purchase some other time. Later that night, he remembers his purchase and decides to pay using his phone instead of his laptop.

Cue problem: Not only is your mobile site design entirely different from your website, but it also uses separate login information, so your online shopper has to create a second account for mobile shopping!

This poses an important question for online retailers: How many times will their customers endure a jarring user experience before they switch to a different brand or online retailer?

Online retailers often undervalue a consistent cross-platform brand experience. They also tend to underestimate the benefits of a seamless shopping experience. The quality and consistency of your shopping experience has a major impact on brand loyalty. Strong omni-channel customer engagement help brands achieve an average customer retention rate of 89% compared to just 33% for brands with weak engagement.

Modern eCommerce solutions assist retailers in delivering a unified shopping experience across channels by facilitating total omni-channel integration with their ERP system. These digital solutions centralize product information management across retail channels in real time, which enables streamlined eCommerce processing and fulfilment, resulting in an enriched customer journey.

Many solutions facilitate simplified order management and allow retailers to execute omni-channel processes like home delivery of products ordered online. These solutions enable smart clienteling and effective digital marketing that helps achieve higher customer engagement and satisfaction. Integrated eCommerce solutions also determine each customer’s lifetime value and offer accurate information about customer loyalty by generating analytics using cross-channel sales information.

To improve operational efficiency and achieve omni-channel retail capabilities, your business should consider investing in ERP-integrated digital eCommerce tools like CommerceLink by Visionet Systems, which integrates your eCommerce platform with Microsoft Dynamics 365 to efficiently monitor customer interactions, streamline product information and order fulfilment, simplify business processes, and help achieve objectives across channels.

Join Visionet’s experts on October 10 for an informative webinar to learn more about how easily digital technology can help your business deliver a consistent brand experience.

Accommodating consumer diversity using business intelligence

Your brand’s many faces

A recent article in Quartz highlighted the significance of social media for the Fashion & Apparel industry. As buyer demographics change, it is vital that fashion brands market their products to a more diverse audience. Instagram and other social media platforms, with their global ubiquity, form a whirlwind of diversity with virtually limitless reach.

These new channels of communication have become a battleground for cutthroat competition between savvy retailers that use smart, provocative marketing techniques to attract and retain a broad and loyal base of customers. Many fashion labels are quickly discovering the business benefits of casting a wider net. As the article mentions, “People will want to buy into a brand they see themselves in”.

Achieving inclusive focus

Catering to a diverse audience comes with its own challenges. You need to reevaluate your brand’s customer segmentation. You also need ways to personalize your marketing collateral for each sub-segment of your newer, more heterogeneous group of consumers. However, deadlines and your marketing budget put hard limits on how many versions of your brand messaging you can create. So how do you achieve mass appeal without trying to be all things to all people?

Digital business intelligence and analytics are redefining how clothing and other experience goods are marketed online to multiple demographics. Leading online retailers use multiple cues from their visitors’ browsing behavior to deliver messaging and visuals that have the highest chance of converting that visit into a sale by resonating with them on a personal level. The more closely your brand’s messaging aligns with a particular visitor’s age, gender, ethnicity, occupation, and interests, the more likely you are to convert that sale.

Some obvious visitor parameters include geographic location and preferred language, but there are many other subtle details that can be tallied and analyzed using machine learning, and then aligned with data from customer surveys and other sources to maximize the impact of each online touchpoint. Some patterns that AI discover during “unsupervised learning” might even seem highly counterintuitive, but yield very robust and repeatable results. The ability to discover these patterns allows AI-powered digital tools to surpass human intuition in online content personalization.

Styles for your subculture

If your brand has a digital fashion analytics solution, but is only using it to personalize marketing campaigns, then you’ve missed the trick. The business intelligence that these solutions provide can be applied across the entire product lifecycle, from concept to clearance. Instead of focusing solely on how to sell the products you have, the most agile global fashion brands also use social media and browsing analytics to inform their design process.

Everything from product wishlists to heatmaps of mouse-clicks on your online store can yield clues about which of your products are receiving the most attention at any given moment. When combined with AI-powered demographics, your brand gains superpowers – you can predict, with a remarkable degree of accuracy, the styles, colors, and variants that will appeal more strongly to a particular target group.

So it isn’t just your online messaging that will evolve – your products will quickly assume the qualities that consumers find irresistible.

Local looks for global brands

Even your brick-and-mortar retail operations will enjoy the fruits of online analytics. Empowered by detailed demographics, you can make sure that each of your stores is stocked with styles that appeal to the people in that neighborhood. Several brands leverage detailed time-series machine learning to determine geographical differences in product seasonality.

In plain English, digital solutions have helped top fashion retailers discover that not everyone starts wearing sweaters in the same week of autumn. As a result, they have been able to optimize their supply chain to ensure that when the weather changes, their new releases dominate the fashion landscape of every city and country they operate in.

Everything old is new again

Similarly, machine learning can make radically effective recommendations for product repositioning that at first might strike you as sheer insanity. Suppose a particular color or style of cardigan has been popular among 50-something plus-size women in New England for several months, but is now suffering a decline in demand. Instead of opting for margin-sapping markdowns to clear your stock and cut your losses, your analytics solution might discover that similar styles are now gaining favor among 20-somethings in the Pacific Northwest! You’ve just been handed an opportunity to charge full price for something you were about to sell at cost.

Different age and income groups also respond differently to various promotional strategies. Some might prefer buy-one-get-one-free offers, while others might respond better to rewards programs. Each group might have a tendency to buy particular sets of products at the same time. Once again, consumer analytics provide clear and quick insights into these differences, and help you retain more customers at a higher lifetime value.

Conclusion

Every person’s tastes are unique, sometimes exceptionally so, but statistics have shown that demographics-based similarities are real. Tapping into these patterns makes good business sense, and can provide an undeniable advantage to tech-savvy fashion brands. Where other apparel manufacturers and retailers rely on volatile and inconsistent “expert opinion”, data-driven businesses let the numbers do the talking.

People around the world use clothing to announce aspects of their culture and group identity. By asking the right questions and leveraging AI-powered analytics, your brand can discover the messaging and product features that resonate with each potential customer. For more details on how machine learning and analytics can inform your fashion brand’s business decisions, please contact Visionet Systems.