Isn't BIG data making headlines in major blogs and heads turn in C-suite from retail to financial services industry? So, what is BIG data and how it all started?
Big data is a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications. The challenges include capture, curation, storage, search, sharing, transfer, analysis, and visualization. The trend to larger data sets is due to the additional information derivable from analysis of a single large set of related data, as compared to separate smaller sets with the same total amount of data, allowing correlations to be found to "spot business trends, determine quality of research, prevent diseases, link legal citations, combat crime, and determine real-time roadway traffic conditions".
Source: Wikipedia
As businesses and marketers try to sell more, it's all about customers: their actions, intentions and behavior. Companies grew and offered more products and services to the customers. At the same time, customers started to engage with brands in multiple ways ( web, mobile and traditional media outlets), increasing complexity for marketers to understand and follow "true" customer behavior and potential as a prospect. Technology enabled gathering data from web, mobile, social media ( Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest etc) and other mediums, leading to a state where it first becomes extremely costly to capture and later to massage the data for any meaningful results.
Though BIG data presents new difficulties from IT to legal department, it certainly presents unique opportunities to explore - a new way to truly understand customers. Leveraging new customers insights from the analyses gives competitive edge and ultimately drives new age marketing decisions. It all looks logical; however, BIG data creates huge problem for large enterprises to move fast enough to capture the value.
According to one of the blogs in Harvard Business Review, most business executives and their IT counterparts agree to implement state of the art system to capture value from BIG data. However, it requires large enterprises to break silo'd approach and bring different line of businesses together to create new data driven culture that can help company achieve higher profitability. This implementation essentially requires executives to change the strategy for the company, hire skilled resources and create culture to cultivate data backed decision.
Once implemented, the returns are limitless and the most important from marketing perspective is to understand customers. Digital Marketing relies on customers' intentions and BIG data provides exactly the same. So, customers can expect to see more relevant content ( including textual, audio or video) and offers on the company's eCommerce portal.
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