EIT Digital: Getting to Know Your Customers With Connected Product Analytics for Brands

BRUSSELS, March 21, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Businesses will never look at their products the same way again.

Connected Product Analytics for Brands (CAB), a new Innovation Activity launched as part of the Digital Industry Action Line of EIT Digital, is going to allow companies to better understand customers' needs and expectations, by gathering and analyzing anonymized data coming from both connected products and online consumer communities.

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By doing so, the CAB solution will support manufacturers answering tough questions such as: which product features are most used and how? Which of them actually provides value to the customers and which are just 'nice-to-have'?

Nowadays, this information is collected using traditional market research methods, such as focus groups and surveys. These tools, while essential, do not allow the kind of constant analysis on product usage now made possible by the combination of real usage data and online feedback and ideas with CAB.

French startup Alfstore is leading the activity, operating as technology provider and business champion. Other partners of the initiative include TIM (connectivity and technology provider), Politecnico di Milano (technology and customer experience expertise provider) and Groupe SEB, the global reference in small domestic equipment (pilot customer).

Groupe SEB's use case addresses the user experience for connected kitchenware appliances and more precisely the i-Companion Connect sold under the Moulinex brand, one of the most popular smart connected food processor on the market.

Designed with GDPR in mind 

CAB will leverage on user and device data to comprehend points of strength and possible flaws of the product, in a way that's deeply respectful of the users' privacy and GDPR-compliant. The data processing, in fact, will be done at an aggregated level, on specific user segments, therefore no personal data coming from a single user will be stored.

"By enabling behavioural analytics for consumer connected products, CAB aims to transform how market research is done for this industry. Sensing customer behaviours while addressing their privacy offers companies the opportunity to make a real difference and be ahead of the curve with better designed and targeted products," Alfstore's R&I Project Manager, Marjorie Seizou says.

Politecnico di Milano will analyze the data coming from the kitchen appliances and from the mobile application. Alfstore will retrieve and analyze the textual data coming from the online community, and combine all the extracted indicators and insights in a dedicated dashboard that will be introduced as an extension to the company's Fanvoice solution.

TIM will work on the "connect & capture" phase, to simplify connectivity and data collection of both smart and "dumb" objects and leveraging on specialized IoT mobile networks and platforms such as Narrowband-IoT and oneM2M; CAB's solution in the near future could also be used in sectors other than smart home equipment, for instance in markets in which manufacturers are adding innovative connectivity features to their products on-the-move, such as luggage and sports apparel.

CAB's groundbreaking solutions will change the way brands understand their customers' behaviour to a degree unheard of so far.

Leveraging on its pan-European network of partners and business developers, EIT Digital will act as last-mile delivery vehicle, with market launch scheduled by the end of this year.

Further information available at: https://www.connectedanalytics.eu/

About EIT Digital

EIT Digital is a leading European open innovation organisation. Our mission is to foster digital technology innovation and entrepreneurial talent for economic growth and quality of life in Europe. We bring together entrepreneurs from a partnership of over 150 top European corporations, SMEs, start-ups, universities and research institutes.

EIT Digital invests in strategic areas to accelerate the market uptake of research-based digital technologies and to bring entrepreneurial talent and leadership to Europe. Our innovation and education activities are organised in and around our co-location centres, where students, researchers, engineers, business developers and entrepreneurs come together to drive the digitalisation of society.

EIT Digital is a Knowledge and Innovation Community of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). Since 2010, EIT Digital has consistently mobilised talent, ideas, technologies, investments and business across Europe and beyond to stimulate disruptive digital innovation. EIT Digital headquarters are in Brussels with co-location centres in Berlin, Budapest, Eindhoven, Helsinki, London, Madrid, Paris, Stockholm, Trento and a hub in Silicon Valley.