This document describes a white paper about Consumer720, a solution that combines internal consumer data with external social media data to provide a more complete view of consumers. It outlines the technical framework needed, including layers for data acquisition, content management, entity resolution, rationalization/enrichment, and consumer engagement. The goal is to help companies better understand consumers, improve acquisition, retention, and profitability in today's social media world.

1. White Paper
Consumer720:
The Keys to Consumer Engagement in a
Social Media World

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Table of contents
1 Executive Summary 4
2 Intra-Enterprise Consumer Insight 5
3 External Consumer Insight 6
4 Why Consumer720 8
5 The Technical Framework to Consumer720 9
6 Acquisition and Ingestion Layer 11
7 Content Management Layer 12
8 Entity Resolution Layer 13
9 Rationalization and Enrichment Layer 14
10 Consumer Engagement Layer 15
11 Call to Action 16
12 Biography 17

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Consumer720:
The Keys to Consumer Engagement in a
Social Media World
Unstructured consumer data has been a kind of siren call to major companies, especially
those in Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) and Retail. Companies have been struggling to
leverage content from call notes, e-mails, audio files and other unstructured data sources for
ages. The goal has always been robust, reliable consumer profiles. The fullest profile -- or most
accurate truth -- about a consumer requires understanding data from all these sources.
Marketers were on the quest for 360-degree consumer views even before social media came
along. In this new age of social media, the growth of available consumer data has exploded.
Consumer insight drives brand positioning, pricing, product and service offerings, and
consumer experience execution. Personalized consumer engagement leads to new
consumers, new revenues and improved margins. The companies with the most complete
understanding of their consumers gain the greatest business transformation. So, how can CPG
and retail firms heed the call to “know thy consumer”?

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1 Executive Summary
More than a trillion dollars of in-store sales are influenced by online interactions. Even the most
savvy retailers and CPG firms need to upgrade their consumer engagement models to remain
competitive in this new consumer world. Clarity Solution Group’s Consumer720 solution boosts
companies’ success by enabling improved consumer acquisition, retention and profitability.
Consumer720 will soon be the standard in business intelligence for marketing advantage.
This paper outlines the former success criteria for consumer insight – the 360-degree consumer
view – and delves deeper into the new 360 that retailers and CPG firms will have to integrate
to be relevant and competitive in a social-media marketplace. More and more buying
decisions are influenced (or made) online and many take place in areas outside traditional
marketing and mass media reach. As a result, the scope of data and insights from data that
are required to grab and hold market share have outpaced most companies’ abilities to keep
up. Clarity can help deliver consumer intelligence and insight required to understand and
profitably manage consumers in this, new data-explosive era.
Step one is to shore up internal 360-degree consumer views. Do you have an enterprise-wide,
validated, timely view of all consumer interactions (from structured and non-structured data)
with your company? Step two is to match your complete internal view of a consumer with
that consumer’s relevant online interactions (+360 external view). Online is where buying
decisions are being influenced and, often, made. Do you know which brands your
consumer’s friends are touting or bashing online? Can you predict a spike in demand or a
boycott, before it happens? Clarity can help upgrade both your traditional and social-media-
derived consumer data to identify new consumers, improve segmentation, enhance analysis
and boost profitability.
This paper concludes with a detailed, technical framework, outlining the requirements to
implement Consumer720. To stay relevant and competitive in this “age of the consumer,” it will
be imperative to have both the internal and external 360-degree views of a consumer. To
learn more, please contact us at info@clarity-us.com.

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2 Intra-Enterprise Consumer Insight
Half of the battle – and no small challenge on its own – is having a complete 360-view of a
consumer from within. This view must include both structured (purchase history) and
unstructured (customer-service call notes) data related to a consumer. Difficulties include:
 accurately identifying consumers across silos within the enterprise
 key marketing systems (campaign management, analytics, CRM, etc.) unable to leverage
holistic consumer data
 tremendous time and effort spent validating, integrating and managing unstructured
consumer data
CPG companies’ efforts to achieve consumer insight have been challenged by their indirect
relationship with the end consumer. And, in retail, most big players are national or even global
operations where personal touch and consumer engagement are difficult to achieve, if not
impossible. Retail is no longer local, where personal relationships and understanding came
more easily.
Clearly CPG and retail companies have not stood idle; great strides have been made. CPG
companies have been pioneers in using market research to understand consumer needs.
Retailers have utilized loyalty programs to gain insight into individual preferences and
purchase patterns. These efforts have generated valuable consumer data to drive marketing,
merchandising and other key functions. Investments in Analytics, Business Intelligence (BI) and
Information Management (IM) have resulted in significant improvements to the quality,
consistency and usability of consumer information across the enterprise. Analytics, BI and IM
technologies have improved efficiency, reduced risk and unlocked insights in firms’ consumer
bases. Analytics, BI and IM have delivered the coveted 360-degree view of a consumer by
creating enterprise-wide, holistic views of each consumer, overcoming silos, validation and
varied data types and structures.
This enterprise-wide (but still internal) 360-degree view of a consumer aids in customer-service
delivery and insight into what consumers buy and where they buy it. The 360-view can bring
measurable gains in operational efficiency and consumer loyalty. But, for the most part, CPG
and retail companies are still looking for transformational business breakthroughs to come from
consumer insight. The 360-degree view has created value and efficiency, but it is only half of
the picture.
The second phase -- and other half of the picture -- is to gather and understand an external
360-view of existing and potential consumers.

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3 External Consumer Insight
The explosion of online interactions (from mobile devices and social media) creates a
potential goldmine of sentiment, profile and behavior data for marketers. Buying decisions are
increasingly being advised online and often in peer-to-peer forums. Consumers use social
media to communicate with and about companies that provide them products and services.
What consumers do and say online illuminates their lifestyle choices, buying preferences and
brand perceptions—potentially valuable consumer-profile data for companies seeking to gain
their wallet share.
Recognizing the value of social-media data and leveraging it appropriately is a relatively new
challenge for many organizations. In 2012, 78 percent of marketers surveyed (by Yesmail and
Infogroup) said they had plans to start integrating or to further integrate with social media to
learn more about what drives and influences consumer behavior. Two years later, marketers
are still working to drive profitability and consumer engagement.
Gleaning insight from social media is increasingly a marketing priority. Consumers are often
unvarnished and highly detailed in their online reviews and discussions of products and brands.
Brewing trends, such as a boycott of a product or brand, can be spotted and addressed far
earlier with social-media data at your fingertips. What consumers are saying on Facebook or
Twitter can provide valuable insight. Data from social media also have the following benefits:
 Profiles are created first-person, making them highly reliable – much more reliable than the
laundry list of attributes that can be purchased from 3rd parties based on magazines
subscriptions delivered to that address several years ago!
 Data embedded within social profiles are real-time. For example, via Facebook or Twitter it
is possible to know that a consumer just attended a specific movie or sporting event,
purchased your product, or visited one of your retail locations and whether or not they
were satisfied.
 The sample size is enormous. Using Facebook as an example, if a corporate brand has
permission-based access to only 1 million US-based Facebook profiles (which can occur in
a number of ways); the result (via a well-executed messaging) is the brand has access to
an audience bigger than the Super Bowl for advertising purposes.
An external, 360-degree view of consumers pulls together their profile, preferences, content,
followers/friends and other sentiment and behavior clues and insights. When you marry your
firm’s internal 360 with the consumer’s online 360, you get what Clarity calls the Consumer720.

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4 Why Consumer720
Forrester Research has defined the Database of Affinity as ‘A catalogue of people’s tastes
and preferences collected by observing their social behaviors’. The ‘Database of Affinity’ has
been referred to by many as the ‘holy grail’ for brand marketers. Our Consumer720 solution
allows consumer brands to marry enterprise data together with social data. The result is a
database which allows consumer-brands to calculate the affinity for their consumers more
accurately than ever before. A key enabler of Consumer720 is social log-in, since this is how to
get access to a consumers social profile (in a permission-based manner). However, our own
research has shown that less than ten percent of consumer goods brands allow consumers to
use social log-in. Within retail, the usage of social log-in is almost non-existent. Admittedly,
consumer adoption of social log-in is slower than anticipated, but the rewards are immense.
Marketers cannot afford to doubt or delay, when it comes to leveraging social-media
consumer data alongside enterprise data to better understand consumer behavior.
Consumer720 accelerates CPG and retail companies’ efforts in three key areas:
 Consumer acquisition
 Consumer retention
 Cost reduction
Take the example of a beverage company, which traditionally uses market research data,
along with data gathered from previous promotions, to align consumers to segments. When
the company adds data from social-media sources to its existing consumer data, it can gain
deeper and broader understanding of its segments. For example, brands that allow consumers
to log in to their websites using their social media ID (i.e. “Log in with Facebook”), are realizing
that Facebook is not only a medium to execute marketing campaigns but also a source of
rich and robust consumer profiles. As a result, the company is able to derive new insights about
its consumer base. New segments and new marketing opportunities are discovered and can
then be implemented.

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5 The Technical Framework to Consumer720
Most CPG and retail companies understand the benefits of having greater insight into their
consumers’ behavior and interactions on social media. So, what’s standing in their way?
To support social-media analytics initiatives, most firms will need to modify their technical
environments. Existing IM and analytics tools may not be adequate for the demands of
integrating, organizing and analyzing structured and unstructured consumer data. The
transition for many CPGs, who are accustomed to working with distributors, to an ecosystem
enabling direct consumer engagement is substantial.
Handling the diverse and dynamic nature of social and other unstructured data sources
requires an IM and analytics architecture that is:
 Modular – not a “one size fits all” solution, but one that can be tailored to many specific
business use cases, following proven technologies that work seamlessly with existing
technology investments
 Scalable – to accommodate the large volumes of structured and unstructured consumer
data while maintaining performance, reliability and depth of analytical capability
 Flexible – allowing firms to leverage packaged tools and applications to accelerate time-
to-value without sacrificing the ability to rapidly accommodate evolving business
requirements
 Platform-agnostic – to leverage existing and emerging capabilities in a dynamic market
To address these requirements, many CPG and retail companies are evolving their IM and
analytics ecosystems into “layered” models defined by the following layers:
 Acquisition and Ingestion
 Content Management
 Entity Resolution
 Rationalization and Engagement
The demands of a Consumer720 initiative -- integrating external social consumer data with
enterprise structured and unstructured consumer data -- introduces new elements and new
tiers to the ecosystem.

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We will explore each of the architectural layers in detail, starting from the bottom of the figure
above.

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6 Acquisition and Ingestion Layer
This foundational layer captures and integrates raw content from internal and external
providers and sources. The volume, velocity, variety and veracity of interactive social content
differ from enterprise data; therefore, the acquisition tier should be schema-agnostic to
manage complex and evolving document formats. Type-safe, failure-free ingestion is
optimized to capture and store consumer interactions while minimizing infrastructure workload
and operational maintenance requirements.
Key requirements for this layer include:
 Accommodating batch, micro-batch and real-time deployment approaches
 Allowing provider integration that considers enterprise, interactive and vendor-supplied
content
 Tuning to reduce latency and performance impacts on the data management tier while
optimizing analytical capabilities

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7 Content Management Layer
Social interaction generates massive volumes of complex data of variable structures, requiring
careful consideration for both cost-effective management and usage patterns. Storage
formats, retrieval access and compression must be optimized for the specific needs of entity
resolution and feature extraction.
Key requirements for this layer include:
 Optimizing access for constant-time retrieval of source-contextual data
 Defining a scalable and cost-effective data management layer
 Tuning to flexible schemas and document storage to manage near-constant schema
changes
 Designing storage and structure to optimize access patterns specific to entity resolution
and feature extraction

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8 Entity Resolution Layer
This layer resolves common attributes for entities and interactions into structured, identified and
classified enterprise definitions. Matching techniques tuned for specific nuances of social
profile data are used to resolve consumer identity across multiple social platforms, as well as
internal interactions. Similarly, contextual classifiers are applied to extract features from
interactive behaviors, relationships and affinities, providing a detailed perspective of
personalized micro-segments of consumer attributes. A great example of contextual
classification is the analysis of the Facebook pages that are “liked” by Facebook users.
Assuming a brand identifies approximately 80 standard classification attributes, contextual
classification can be used to analyze the millions of potential Facebook page likes to
determine which of the 80 standard classification attributes are impacted.
Entity resolution and feature extraction both require computationally expensive combinatorial-
pattern and similarity-recognition algorithms. Architecting on top of a massively parallel
processing foundation enables constant tuning and enhancement to optimize outcomes
through both directed analysis and closed-loop feedback. Driven by a dedicated data
science lab that scales linearly with infrastructure, this layer serves a dual purpose -- for
programmatic data management and exploratory analysis, supporting ongoing optimization.
Key requirements for this layer include:
 Employing a tunable and extensible entity-resolution approach that encourages
optimization and enhancement
 Integrating analysis lab capabilities with a data-quality framework for ongoing activity
classification prioritized by business needs and use cases

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9 Rationalization and Enrichment Layer
The rationalization and enrichment layer manages the structured view of the consumer,
providing a single high-performing access layer. “Unstructured data analysis” may sound like
an oxymoron. The first step in support of analyzing unstructured data requires the application
of structure and quantitative measurement. At this point, unstructured data management
becomes a form of structured data analysis.
The rationalization and enrichment tier provides a high-performance, structured, semantic
layer leveraging enterprise-data definitions to provide a comprehensive 720-degree enterprise
and social-media view of the consumer. Key requirements for this layer include:
 Defining standardized, structured and governed semantic access to qualified individuals
enhanced with actionable features
 Enabling seamless integration with third-party tools
 Designing with consumer-engagement processes and technologies in mind
 Optimizing for interactive performance accessible to business users

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10Consumer Engagement Layer
Effective consumer engagement requires a longitudinal view of consumer lifecycle and
lifestyle across a broad portfolio of attributes. Promoting positive engagement is a science as
much as an art, requiring a platform that puts the consumer at the center. Key requirements
for this layer include:
 Ensuring closed-loop optimization to enhance and evolve consumer relationships (e.g.
incorporating campaign response data back into the Consumer720 solution)
 Two-way communication that adapts to the consumer’s unique preferences and
behaviors
 Ability to integrate with industry-leading campaign management tools
 Incorporating quantified A/B testing and feedback control through machine learning and
test design (e.g. the ability to build predictive models to target the consumers most likely to
respond to an offer)

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11Call to Action
Major brands and retailers must be able to engage with consumers on social media to
compete in today’s market. The digital world is becoming the biggest driver in influencing
shopping behavior and brand loyalty. Being “social-media-aware” means leveraging
knowledge obtained from social channels to improve the level of personalization within each
interaction. Gaining a 720-degree view of your consumers means engaging with them
constantly and meaningfully on multiple digital channels.
Prior to actual implementation of Consumer720, it is important to lay the right groundwork.
That groundwork should include the following:
 Actively driving consumers to your own website and encouraging them to create user
profiles. While the vast majority of retailers already do this, CPG brands have room to
improve. Furthermore, allowing the consumers to log-in with their existing social identities
(from Facebook, for example), is a best practice.
 Providing timely and valuable content and incentives to consumers via a branded
presence on Facebook with the goal of getting the consumer to “Like” your page. Benefits
include improved organic reach results, as well as the ability to know all the Facebook
users that like your page.
 Giving consumers a real reason to follow your brand on Twitter. Twitter provides a robust set
of APIs that allow access to the historical tweets for specific users. In addition, Twitter’s new
analytics provide robust access to engagement, not just impressions.
This important groundwork lays the required foundation for taking the next steps toward
Consumer720. Over the next 30 years, roughly $140 trillion in new consumer spending will be
up for grabs. “The winners will be enterprises that create an aligned, integrated experience for
their consumers on a foundation of exceptional service,” according to the Gallup
BusinessJournal, July 15, 2014.
CPG and retail companies must continue to invest in digital marketing and technologies to
stay relevant. To win in the months and years ahead, they must also invest in truly
understanding what the digital, social-media world can reveal about their consumers,
products and practices. Adding the second 360-degree consumer view to an arsenal of
business intelligence prepares firms to acquire new consumers, retain high-value consumers
and boost profitability. Deep consumer insight can only be revealed and understood if it
comes from thorough analysis of all meaningful sources available.
Clarity’s Consumer720 solution is a robust and flexible solution that helps brands manage their
consumer relationships in the digital age. The solution includes a reference architecture, data
model, entity resolution framework and accelerators for social media connectivity. Clairty’s
implementation experience has allowed us to define a framework that supports rapid
realization of value in an iterative fashion. To learn more about the Clarity Consumer720
solution, please contact us at info@clarity-us.com.

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12Biography
Duane Lyons
Practice Lead - Emerging
Industries and MDM
Competency Lead at
Clarity Solution Group
Mr. Lyons is a member of Clarity Solution Group’s Leadership Team
and leads its Retail / Consumer Packaged Goods practice. He is
also the executive owner for the Consumer720 solution.
Previously, he was a partner in the Information Transformation
Practice at Infosys Consulting for 8+ years, where he led a $200M
USD practice. He has extensive experience in customer operations,
master data management (with an emphasis on customer and
product subject areas) and Business Intelligence (18+ years) and
acts as a subject matter expert in database marketing and
business intelligence strategies. Prior to joining Infosys Consulting,
Mr. Lyons led the open systems BI practice of Inforte and managed
the Managed Analytics competency. That competency acted as
the “data” agency of record for clients such as America Online
and Estee Lauder and handled ongoing design, execution, and
measurement of marketing campaigns.
Mr. Lyons has vast industry experience as well with companies such
as CVS/Caremark, Hillshire Brands, American Greetings, Newell
Rubbermaid, Bank of America, Royal Bank of Scotland, and United
Airlines.
In addition, Mr. Lyons has been a frequent speaker at MDM
conferences and numerous national and regional marketing
conferences including DMA conventions, NCDM, and DMDays in
New York. Mr. Lyons has also participated as chairperson of the
Database Marketing SIG of the Chicagoland Association of Direct
Marketing (CADM).
Duane has an M.S in Computer Science from DePaul University
(1997) and a B.S. in Interdisciplinary Engineering from Purdue
University (1990).