The Future Of Marketing Combines Big Data With Human Intuition

When it comes to marketing as a job function, many marketers take pride in their "marketing guts" to make decisions. The marketing gurus come with amazing innovative campaign, but most of the time those memorable marketing ideas could be one in thousands of ideas that were actually successful. We are now in the age of big data, and technology enable marketers to rely their decision on much more integrated data. Most of the time the two things wont go in the same direction, and marketers that refuse to look at the data may find their new campaign being ineffective and wasting company's budget.

All in all, we are not saying that marketers should stop being creative and rely on massive data. The marketing function should be human center. The data technologies are just a tool to making things easier to understand and cheaper to test out. Marketer can analyse large amount of data to see whether their hypothesis can work or not prior to rolling it out in the market. Fatemeh Khatibloo, a senior analyst at Forrester Research just published research on the help of data to marketing and technology management and its effect on firm's startegy, below are some of the interesting findings:

• No industry is immune to the disruptive potential of the data explosion. We’ve all heard the stories about healthcare, media, and travel. But even one of the most traditional industries in the world — agriculture — is using data to transform itself. John Deere Company’s Farmsight is truly visionary: it turns farming into a high-tech, data savvy business that helps farmers balance intuition (qualitative) with data-driven (quantititative) insights.
• Doing big data doesn’t come without a few risks. We’ve all seen the White House’s report onthe privacy risks of big data, and of course those risks are significant. But it doesn’t stop there. Business that start leveraging more data for better insight also need to prepare for the unknown financial liabilities of big data (the fines and lawsuits against companies that “misuse” data are just beginning). But beyond that, big data challenges us to ask, “just because we can, should we?” The question applies to everything from using customer data to predict sensitive health conditions to whether parole boards should be required to rely on statistical models to predict recidivism.
• The old way of defining big data just doesn’t cut it anymore. We’ve spent the last half decade focused on three Vs (volume, velocity, variety) that attempted to describe what big data was, but didn’t tell us a thing about what it could do. It’s time for us to focus on the how and why of data. We think that means mastering context, changing your organizational culture, developing the right capabilities, and yes, acquiring the capacity to transform your data into insight.
• Finally, tech managers can’t do this alone; business leaders need to step up. Do we expect you to become a technologist overnight? Of course not. But it’s imperative that marketers become willing stakeholders in the big data journey. You must help your technology peers understand your business challenges, and your vision for how you will be engaging your customers in the future, whether that’s 12 months or five years from now. You must be an advisor to the technology strategy process and, conversely, include BT in the buying process for outsourced marketing technology solutions. Your ability to bridge this yawning gap will transform your organization’s approach to big data.