There is a science behind predicting consumer behavior – literally. Customer behavior scientists forecast consumer buying habits by estimating how different segments of the population will respond to, use and purchase specific products and services. This is based on a black box model. People respond to a stimulus, which is the core of the black box model, but how do retailers create the right stimuli for their brand? Demographics play a big role. How can you put demographics to work enhancing your sales potential?

Geographical analytics are at the core of many decisions that you’ll make about your business. Whether you’re trying to decide where you want to open a new franchise or who you want to advertise to, analytics will tell you where your customers are and what they’re interested in. Nevertheless, there are some mistakes that franchisees can make when they’re looking at their analytics. Data is only one part of a thorough analysis; you also need to be able to derive actionable, insightful information from that data as well.

Historically speaking, one of the biggest challenges that professionals in the franchise industry face on a daily basis is one of logistics. Managing one location with dozens of employees, many of whom are likely spread out across great distances as they work both in a physical location and even potentially in the field, is difficult on the best of days – to say nothing of how hard everything becomes if you add two, three or even four additional locations.

It’s no secret that the world we live in is getting smaller every day due in large part to the technology that plays a more important role in our lives as time marches on. Statistically speaking, almost 80% of adults in the United States now carry a device in their pockets all day long that is more powerful than the technology that ushered the space program into existence in the 1950s and 1960s – their smartphones.

There are many key demographic insights that can be achieved through the use of big data mining. Big data analytics are often utilized through cloud data warehousing solutions, which have the resources needed to analyze and keep tremendously large amounts of data.

Despite the name, the cloud has nothing to do with the sky above our heads and is instead more directly related to the world around us. It’s about taking pieces of information and making them available wherever you happen to be, regardless of where you happen to be, provided that you have access to some type of device with an active Internet connection.