Marketing Big Data

Introduction
Big Data is indeed a better idea. Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data–so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. This data comes from everywhere: posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos posted online, transaction records of online purchases, and from cell phone GPS signals to name a few. This data is big data.
“Much like the scientific principle that we can’t observe a system without changing it, big data can’t be used without an impact- it’s just too big and fast”, as stated by Kord Davis,2012. Marketer Researchers have applied analytics to some pretty large data stores for a long time. Big data can amplify our values, making them much more powerful and influential, especially when they are collected and focused toward a specific desired outcome. Leveraging big data in new ways will enhance the ability to make marketing more effective, not just cost-wise, but in the ability to shape and target messaging in a highly customizable way. Underlying the definitions, though, is the growing role that data plays in helping identify, understand and communicate with target audiences. The major implications of Privacy and Ownership and their positives for research in markets and an organizations growth will be discussed in the paragraphs below.
Opportunity
Big data is more than a challenge; it is an opportunity to find insight in new and emerging types of data allowing to unearth the opportunities hidden in the current data giving an unfair advantage over the competition and to answer questions that, in the past, were beyond reach. Previously, there was no practical way to harvest this opportunity and opens the door to a world of possibilities, giving organisations a solution to design specifically to the needs of the consumer in mind. Big data is a boon to market-research firms. The internet has widened the ways to reach and market to an audience because every page viewed and every click made is recorded. Marketing teams are pouring through the huge amounts of data available from search and social media leaders such as Google and Facebook.

Information is wealth
A more useful way of thinking about big data is as a set of technologies that enable collecting, storing, and processing large volumes of unstructured data in an efficient way. Market researchers have always dealt with large volumes of structured data from a variety of sources to find useful correlations and market insights. Marrying the output of unstructured with the familiar structured data to gain unprecedented insights about the market is the best justification for investing in big data in the market research space. Interpreting and analysing different data types in conjunction with each other can create tremendous value.
Big data tools are emerging to be of great help to banks and financial institutes in utilizing the depth of data collected. The media and entertainment sector, though with a small market share contribution currently; is expected grow at a “CAGR of 41.4% from 2012 to 2018”, according to Doug Patterson, 2012. This growth will primarily be due to the humungous amount of data generated through games, images, videos and so on. Healthcare is another large and important segment of the world economy that has been facing tremendous productivity challenges in the form of drug failure, drug approval and regulatory barriers. Big data helps the healthcare market players in managing their data efficiently, making important corporate decisions and formulating business growth strategies.
Necessity for big data: Why is it extracted?
Marketers are under pressure to support customer-satisfaction initiatives at the same time they're being asked to prove the return on investment for marketing spending. “The amount of data in our world has been exploding, and analyzing large data sets will become a key basis of competition, underpinning new waves of productivity growth, innovation, and consumer surplus”, according to research by MGI and McKinsey's Business Technology Office. It is important to realize that big data comes in many shapes and sizes. It also has many different uses – real-time fraud detection, web display advertising and competitive analysis, call centre optimization, social media and sentiment analysis, intelligent traffic management and smart power grids, to name just a few. All of these analytical solutions involve significant and growing volumes of both multi-structured and structured data.
Many of these analytical solutions were not possible previously because they were too costly to implement, or because analytical processing technologies were not capable of handling the large volumes of data involved in a timely manner. In some cases, the required data simply did not exist in an electronic form.
New and evolving analytical processing technologies now make possible what was not possible before. Examples include:
• New data management systems that handle a wide variety of data from sensor data to web and social media data.
• Improved analytical capabilities including event, predictive and text analytics.
Supporting big data involves combining these technologies to enable new solutions that can bring significant benefits to future research.
Use of Big Data:
The applications of big data can be largely seen in various retail, corporate, government and health care institutes and also in our day to day activities. Big Data has helped researchers identify events before they occur. This is called “predictive analytics.” Predictive analytics is becoming an important tool for many businesses.
Corporate
Making big data available across an entire business has considerable benefits. It can encourage underperforming divisions, to improve without management intervening. A common application is to rank sales targets by division or even individuals. Demand is growing for software that can deliver this variety of statistics and performance indicators.
Individuals/Groups
The panel companies, in general, progressively collect hundreds of data points related to panellist demographics, geography, and psychographics to form a user profile. These data points are usually collected based on self-stated information provided by the users through survey questions. The users can be specifically targeted by market researchers for surveys and focus groups based on their profiles.
Ethical and Societal Implications: A Boon
Privacy and ownership of data obtained and who should control access to data is a major topic of discussion. Individuals must be offered meaningful rights to access their data in a usable, machine-readable format. This, in turn, will unleash a wave of innovation for user-side applications and services based on access and market researchers can use this data to target their audiences, a process referred to as the “featurization” of big data. “Data-directed decision making” enjoy a 5%–6% increase in productivity.
Data generated during medical treatment, but also with equipment the hospital provided, based on know-how developed over decades in various businesses, universities, and government-linked institutions, all in the course of saving one’s life. In addition to generating profits, that same data may help save lives down the road. As the legal scholar Paul Ohm puts it, “data can be either useful or perfectly anonymous, but never both.”
Customer service: Excellent customer service is critical to the success of an ecommerce site. Flipkart and Myntra are examples of terrific market research and data mining performed by market researchers and the velocity with which they are delivered stand out for themselves.
Larger data sets help increase fraud detection. Provided the right infrastructure and mining tools to the market researchers, to detect fraud in real-time. This will lead to a safer environment and more reliable data on the internet. Most online retailers need to process their sales transactions against defined fraud patterns, for detection
Supply chain visibility. Market researchers have found that all their customers expect to know the exact availability, status, and location of their orders. This can get complicated for retailers if multiple third parties are involved in the supply chain. But, it is a challenge that needs to be overcome to keep customers happy. This gives opportunity for the retailers to know the reliable shipment companies in the market. A customer who has purchased a backordered product would want to know the status. This will require your commerce, warehousing, and transportation functions to communicate with each other and with any third-party systems in your supply chain.

Responsibilities on the data
Data Integrity, Security, Reliability & Scalability is the four key factors that can determine the return from Big Data. Search Marketers are among the most data-driven people on this planet. They make important decisions around keywords, pages, content, link building and social media activity based on the data in hand.
Source data from trusted sources: Trust matters. Market researchers need to make sure that the data collected from the technology vendor is from reliable sources. The data is acquired through partnerships with trusted data sources so that one can have access to the latest and greatest data from these sources and are always tracked back to check that their origins do no tie back to black hat approaches.
Data is Reliable: The data is maintained at high level of redundancy and failover reliability, and data centre backup facilities are at separate locations for disaster recovery assurance and peace of mind. The marketing technology vendors have a variety of guideline that guarantee data availability at all times.

Future of Big data
Marketing is no stranger when it comes to meeting the challenges of changing media. Never before has that solid history of successfully adopting and adapting to change been more important than it is today. Throughout every major shift in media the goal of marketing has remained essentially unchanged: “deliver the right message to the right person at the right time for the right price.”Technology that can dramatically enhance the ability to achieve that goal is where you will find the most successful marketing professionals. Big data driven digital marketing is where you will find them today and tomorrow. The inevitable process of migrating away from traditional marketing approaches to data-driven techniques is indeed a ‘process.’ It will take time. How much time will vary greatly from business to business depending upon specific needs and goals, availability of data-proficient talent, CMO vision, CIO collaboration, willingness to invest, support from the top and a host of other variables.

Conclusion
Big data is here to stay .Many people view big data as an over-hyped buzzword. It is, however, a useful term because it highlights new data management and data analysis technologies that enable market researchers to analyze certain types of data and handle various types of workload that were not previously possible. The actual technologies used will depend on the volume of data, the variety of data, the complexity of the analytical processing workloads involved, and the responsiveness required by the business. It will also depend on the capabilities provided by vendors for managing, administering, and governing the enhanced environment. These capabilities are important selection criteria for product evaluation.
Big data, however, involves more than simply implementing new technologies. It requires senior management to understand the benefits of smarter and timelier decision making. It also requires business users to make pragmatic decisions about agility requirements for analyzing data and producing analytics, given tight IT budgets. The good news is that many of the technologies outlined in this essay not only support smarter decision making, but also provide faster time to value.