As an engineer not yet turned marketer, I remember liking this sentence I heard from a CMO friend: “marketing stops when particular cases start” she said. Still today, I often hear people come out with “I don’t like this” or “I wouldn’t use that” or “This guy wouldn’t like that”. Examples are good as they help make things concrete but marketing is about building generalizations that are the most likely to succeed - not dealing with single individual’s particular cases.

Guess work vs data-driven marketing

Historically, the amount of work required to collect data and build statistically significant samples was just enormous. Big brands with big budgets could do it - and maybe only some of them could. Most SMBs couldn’t.

The result?

Guess work most of the time.

Or again, sample-of-1 decision making.

In 2 words: bad marketing.

How does big data change this?

Big data system remove one of the main hurdle of collecting data: dealing with heterogeneous data sources. Databases were simply not built historically to deal with various data from various sources formatted in various formats.

Not anymore.

With big data system, data from your existing sources can now be aggregated and bring value that you couldn’t leverage before.

Update: this is a new trend.

Conclusion:

Are you having challenges, making data-driven decisions? Contact us.