Case Study: Pathfinder Competition Analyser
Short form
Pathfinder Solutions was a market analytics consultancy that answered the hardest questions in retail: who are your customers, where should your next store go, and what should be on its shelves. From around 2005, Redgum built them the Competition Analyser: a drillable map of Australia with the census, Pathfinder’s own “52 faces of Australia” segmentation and the client’s customer data all prepared and waiting. A week’s worth of analysis became a couple of hours of question and answer. In February 2010, Deloitte bought the company.
The challenge
Pathfinder’s product was insight. Banks, retailers, anyone with a large consumer base came to them to understand who their customers were and where their next opportunity sat. The raw material was there: census data, transaction line items, hundreds of millions of records of what Australians actually buy.
The problem was the distance between the data and the answer. Every question meant queries in SQL Server or SPSS, deep knowledge of how to drive those tools, and shaping the data by hand for each individual answer. The analysts spent their week being data engineers and their spare moments being analysts. That is the shape of problem Redgum looks for: expensive people doing cheap work because the tooling makes them.
What we built
The Competition Analyser, one of a suite of tools Redgum built for Pathfinder alongside the Market Analyser, put a map of Australia at the centre of the practice. Any analyst could drill into any area and see the census data for the people who lived there.
On top of the census sat Pathfinder’s own intellectual property: the 52 faces of Australia, their segmentation of the entire population into 52 categories based on census patterns and buying behaviour. A store does not attract “everyone”. It attracts types 7, 23 and 32, and each of those types shops differently. The third layer was the client’s own customers. Pathfinder would load a client’s customer data, Myer’s MYER one loyalty card being the flagship example, and match it to the census geography. Now the map showed who shopped somewhere, what they bought, and who was conspicuously missing.
When the picture was clear, the tool did the production work too, generating templated PowerPoint packs with maps and data sheets for every region, and delivery reports that ran to 500 pages of store-by-store analysis and recommendation.
The outcome
What used to be a week’s worth of query-shaping became a couple of hours of question and answer. Because asking cost minutes instead of days, the analysts could afford curiosity: follow a hunch, test a variation, ask the next question while the last answer was still fresh. A retailer could ask where its next store should go and get back candidate locations drilled down to the correct side of the street, and range each store to what the people around it actually buy.
The tools let a boutique consultancy take on far more work at far greater depth than its size suggested. In February 2010 Deloitte acquired Pathfinder Solutions and folded its people and practice into what Deloitte then described as the largest business-centric data analytics provider in Australia.