The Role of Analytics in Data-Driven Business Models of Multi-Sided Platforms: An exploration in the food industry

literature shows that apart from revenue growth and cost optimization, data analytics can decrease customer acquisitions costs, retain valuable customers, help predict customer behaviour, improve customer experience, reduce fraud, provide real time offers, and enhance decision making (McAfee & Brynjolfsson, 2012; Redman, 2015; Wamba et al., 2017). However, data on its own is not a source of competitive advantage since all firms can collect hordes of data from a variety of sources. Rather, data must be purposely analyzed, and activated. Nonetheless, firms face a host of issues organizational, financial, physical, and human resources in their attemps to create a competitive capability from the use of data (Gupta & George, 2016; Ghasemaghaei, 2018), and may easily fail to exploit the benefits of data analytics (Erevelles et al., 2016).