Barnes & Noble presents at the Big Analytics Roadshow, 2012 in New York City on December 12, 2012 Presentation title: Using Big Data to Quantify Loyalty - 'Do you come here often?', by Rafael Mejia Customer loyalty traditionally has been measured by running surveys to determine the customer’s 'willingness to recommend', satisfaction, etc. Now, with the ability to analyze vast amounts of sales data, online behavior, and reading patterns, Barnes & Noble can measure shifts in customer loyalty at individual stores, regions, or channels. Methods that have long been available for measuring online behavior are now being applied to their brick-and-mortar stores, for a comprehensive view of customer purchase patterns, enabling Barnes & Noble to improve services that better address an individual customer’s needs.

2. Democratizing Analytics
Lessons Learned at Barnes & Noble

3. Company Overview
• Established in 1873
• Nearly 700 retail locations, hosting nearly
100,000 community events every year
• Yearly sales of 300 million copies of 1 million
unique titles
• Extremely dynamic sales environment,
Bestsellers account for less than 5% of sales
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4. NOOK®
• B&N introduced NOOK in 2009, now
represents 27% of all eBook sales
• Business has grown to include apps,
magazines, movies and TV shows
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5. Background
• Aster customer since 2010
• Aster is our enterprise data warehouse
• Our implementation contains over 100TB of
data and is growing by ~6TB per month
• Recent adoptee of Tableau Reporting Software
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6. Data Culture
• Top-down mandate to eliminate information
silos
• ETL group “loads first, asks questions later”
• Users have access to as much data as we can
provide
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7. Analysts
• Some subject matter
expertise
• Comfortable with
spreadsheets and SQL
• Fully immersed in the
specific challenges and
priorities of their
department
• Readily available
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8. Data Scientists
• Experts in math,
statistics, data
engineering, pattern
recognition and
learning, modeling, etc,
etc.
• Expensive, hard to find
and often hard to
integrate into non-
technical teams
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9. Business Leaders
• Significant subject
matter expertise
• Limited technical
expertise
• Responsible for
departmental outcomes
• Swamped
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10. Citizens
Analysts Data Scientists Business Leaders
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11. Lesson 1
Analytics have to keep pace with the
organization if they have any hope of adding
value to the organization
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12. Lesson 2
There is a lot to be gained in allowing business
users access to data systems before they are
‘perfect’
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13. Lesson 3
The best tools encourage collaboration
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14. Questions or Comments?
Rafael Mejia
rmejia@book.com
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