Interview: How Toys “R” Us Uses Social Data to Unearth Powerful Consumer Insights

Toys “R” Us is the world’s leading specialty toy and baby products retailer, with stores in 37 countries and an annual workforce of approximately 62,000 employees worldwide.

Many of us will fondly remember visiting a Toys “R” Us store as a child and staring in wonder at the rows and rows of brightly colored delights.

The fortune 500 company is relentlessly striving to be the best toy and baby products retail company in the world, and although facing fierce competition from purely online retailers like Amazon, Toys “R” Us has the ability to offer and provide a unique and special in-store experience for its customers – something ecommerce sites simply can’t compete with.

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Consumer Insights: Traditional blended with social data

We recently spoke with John Trenholm, Director of Consumer Insights at Toys“R”Us about how he brings valuable and actionable consumer insights into the business, supporting both the Toys “R” Us and Babies “R” Us brands across its brick-and-mortar stores, as well as its dot-com website.

John typically sees consumer insights being absorbed and utilized most heavily by the marketing department, but the information John and his team gather supports the entire business from operations and merchandising through to PR and HR.

There has been tremendous excitement over the many online and mobile research methods that have emerged in the last 5-10 years, however this excitement hasn’t obsoleted traditional research methods at the retailer.

“We use quantitative and qualitative methods, predominantly online but also phone, in person and in market interviews.  We let the consumer tell us when and how they want to give us feedback.” explains John.

As a major retailer Toys “R” Us itself produces an enormous amount of data – for example point of sale data, as well as data from its loyalty card program. Alone, this data is a big repository of customer insights because it tells Toys “R” Us what the customer actually did, not what they said they did on social sites such as Twitter or Facebook.

Toys “R” Us uses Brandwatch as its social analytics partner and recently worked with us on a report on Black Friday. Some of the much talked about benefits of social data is that is can be cheaper, faster and more robust than a lot of other datasets.

For the report social data was great, because instead of going out and asking the questions and have the questions lead the witness, we got more of an unbiased response and we could really do more exploration on a massive scale.

The Black Friday report will help support  multiple departments across the business from legal, finance, marketing, manufacturers. But ultimately it will benefit consumers, because the work will let the team deliver a better, more relevant experience for consumers.

‘The report will help us make strategic decisions that will have broad impact’ says John.

Although social analytics has huge benefits John doesn’t believe social customer insights is a straight up replacement for traditional methods, but rather they support one another.

‘There are positives to social and positives to traditional. They get me to the end result with the same quality, but in different ways. It’s a great problem to have… two great ways to answer questions and both are safe choices.’

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The evolution of research

The evolution of customer research has seen methods including phone, mail, in person and online to name a few.

Many of these legacy approach suffer from the lack of efficiency and speed.

With social research the data and information is accessible quickly, however the challenge now is the way people communicate via social changes so rapidly.

‘We keep evolving the methodology but the big challenge now is images and video. Social analytics platforms were built around text analysis, but the speed that the industry is moving, and the speed that these platforms and consumers are moving towards video and images is phenomenal. I heard somebody say this; ‘if a picture is worth a thousand words, how do I figure out what those thousand words are?’

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Getting to actionable insights faster

Trends in the retail industry move fast. This is true for toys, as well as fashion. John is always thinking about how he can help the company move faster.

‘How can we empower the organization to insert the customer in their decision? We move so fast, sometimes we may only have two weeks to launch a new idea. So how fast can I get to insights and data that will help the business move forward?’

Thinking back to traditional research methods and working with the big legacy market research companies, John tells us projects can take a weeks upon weeks and cost tens of thousands of dollars.

‘That’s just not reasonable in today’s business environment and so this is where new technology driven partners perform well, as they’re doing things for a fraction of that cost, 25% of the cost in many cases, if not less, and on timelines measured in days, without meaningful sacrifices in quality.’ explains John.