Retailers Need to Predict the Future
I had written a post this morning about how Twitter could make for an interesting acquisition target by a large retailer. My thinking was that you could predict the future by eavesdropping on millions of conversations. Then it occurred to me later while I was out on a run, Amazon is already eavesdropping on millions of conversations. Literally, listening to real people speak to each other.
Genius. I should have thought of this before. If Amazon could transcribe this data and scour it with applications designed to look for various words or phrases they’d have better data than even Twitter itself. People tend to talk about things before they actually do them. You could, in a sense, predict the future with this data.
In the nineties, Walmart won the respect of the retailing world for developing a cutting edge system that allowed them to immediately place an order with their vendors every time it made a sale. If you bought a bottle of shampoo, Walmart could immediately make note that it needed to order one more bottle by the end of the week so that it didn’t lose a future sale.
Amazon could essentially leapfrog Walmart and know what people are going to buy, before they even leave the house to buy it. Twitter could potentially do something similar but to a lesser extent since people speak more than they type.
So we can scratch Amazon from the list of potential retailers who might want to purchase Twitter. They’re already eavesdropping on America. A potential Twitter suitor would have to be a large old-school retailer with no real intelligence assets. For someone like Walmart, Costco, or Target a Twitter acquisition would make a lot of sense.
Not only might it make sense, it might be absolutely necessary if they expect Amazon to encroach into their territory at some point. It might help them defend their turf from Amazon which already has a head start in predicting the future. Come on Walmart. Do you really think I’m gonna go to your store, park half a mile away to buy a pint of coffee cream only to get stuck behind some lady with a hundred items in the express lane? Do you think I’m willing to do that when Amazon could have a drone deliver to my door in thirty minutes?
In the nineties, Walmart won the respect of the retailing world for developing a cutting edge system that allowed them to immediately place an order with their vendors every time it made a sale. If you bought a bottle of shampoo, Walmart could immediately make note that it needed to order one more bottle by the end of the week so that it didn’t lose a future sale.
Amazon could essentially leapfrog Walmart and know what people are going to buy, before they even leave the house to buy it. Twitter could potentially do something similar but to a lesser extent since people speak more than they type.
So we can scratch Amazon from the list of potential retailers who might want to purchase Twitter. They’re already eavesdropping on America. A potential Twitter suitor would have to be a large old-school retailer with no real intelligence assets. For someone like Walmart, Costco, or Target a Twitter acquisition would make a lot of sense.
Not only might it make sense, it might be absolutely necessary if they expect Amazon to encroach into their territory at some point. It might help them defend their turf from Amazon which already has a head start in predicting the future. Come on Walmart. Do you really think I’m gonna go to your store, park half a mile away to buy a pint of coffee cream only to get stuck behind some lady with a hundred items in the express lane? Do you think I’m willing to do that when Amazon could have a drone deliver to my door in thirty minutes?
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