Jul 23, 2015
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Orange juice seems fairly straight forward, right?
The juice….from an orange.
But for the Minute Maid company it’s a bit more complex, as they have made millions of dollars by throwing in a dash of data into the mix.
As a child product of The Coca-Cola Company, an organization known for its use of special formulas and recipes, encouraged Minute Maid to spare no expense in producing, analyzing, evaluating, and reanalyzing numbers and data significant to their production of orange juice.
Of course they wanted to find the usual marketing numbers specific to consumers (demographics, tastes and preferences, average income, etc.), but there was apparently a lot more to that when it came to orange juice. For example, not every orange is the same. An algorithm based on the average ripeness, texture, juicy-ness (?), and overall taste from one batch of oranges to the next was made to ensure they picked the best ones.
Other data dealing with the likes supply chain management such as crop availability and shipping methods were also used in their analysis. In the end they came up with more than 600 possible flavors of orange juice! But it didn’t stop there as they then had to whittle down that number to just a select few; a process that required its whole own set of algorithms and analyzing to make a decision.
All this talk of complicated number crunching could seem very daunting and time consuming. But let us sum up their process in one simple formula that we all can understand.
Now of course that’s the ultra-simplified version, but nonetheless you can see that big data and analytics have made Minute Maid millions of dollars. Now we understand a business such as yours may not have the analytical and number processing power that the likes of The Coca-Cola Company, but don’t ever skip out on data to fulfill your marketing needs. You’ll be happy you did.
