The days leading up to and after a Super Bowl can yield mountains of useful big data for manufacturers and retailers alike, but this won’t help you score winning sales immediately. To successfully capitalize on the gold mine of data a company can collect during a Super Bowl season, there are several factors that need to be considered.

Implement a Plan
Utilizing the valuable data that you collect this year will allow you to create and implement a plan for the following year. Analyze the data to find trends and answers to different questions that arise, such as why did this store sell out and why was this product so popular? An effective strategy for next year can be built from analyzing the large sets of data from before, during and after this year’s Super Bowl. If you only analyze data from during the Super Bowl, then you are missing a few key pieces of the puzzle.

Think Outside the Box
Successfully using big data to solve business problems requires creative thinking. For example, competitor advertisements can impact the sales of your products. Consumers may go to the store to purchase the product they saw in an advertisement but then see yours lying on the shelf next to it. Look at all of the advertisements that ran around the Super Bowl season to see how they may have affected yours and your competitor’s sales. By finding which advertisements were a success for each brand and which ones positively – or negatively – impacted sales, you can use that information to formulate a stronger advertising and marketing strategy for the following year.

Improve Demand Forecasting
Demand forecasting is pivotal to the success of a retailer and manufacturer, and it isn’t easy to do with all of the predictable and unpredictable factors that potentially impact production demands. However, using the data from the most recent Super Bowl enables a company to increase their accuracy of next year’s production needs. Demand forecasting is absolutely critical in preventing empty shelves and optimizing manufacturing. Empty shelves during the Super Bowl season will equate to a large loss in potential sales.

In order to win the next Super Bowl season, you should have already gathered data to be planning for the following year. Through analyzing the data you’ll be able to optimize a business and avoid any surprises; get manufacturing optimized for next year; prepare advertisements; and a data scientist will know exactly how to analyze the data; what information needs to be pulled from it; and how to utilize the data to find tangible business solutions.