Download From the Crowd to the Cloud: Five Ways That Big Data Will Make Us

From the Crowd to the Cloud: Five Ways That Big
Data Will Make Us Smarter Marketers
By Greg Verdino
[email protected]
Editor’s note: This is an excerpt from an article that appeared in the summer 2013 issue of Marketing
Insights. To read the full article, go to MarketingPower.com/marketinginsights.
As far back as 2006, loyalty marketing expert Clive Humby declared data the “new oil,” a
resource with the same transformative, wealth-creating power that 19th-century industrialists and
21st-century magnates alike have associated with the fossil fuel. It’s an analogy that has only
grown more appropriate over the intervening years, although today we know that data differs
from oil in one important way: The world’s supply of information is anything but scarce.
Where Humby spoke simply of Data, today’s marketers must consider Big Data to be a deluge of
information of such unprecedented volume, variety and velocity that it strains even the largest
enterprise’s capacity to extract actionable understanding that will inform its leaders’ decisions
about everything from strategy to sales. Consider that many large corporations already sit
on vast, fragmented, often underutilized storehouses of customer data gleaned from past
advertising campaigns, retail POS systems, product registrations, customer service call logs and
the like. Now add the exabytes (one quintillion bytes) of real-time data generated as billions of
connected consumers and customers engage with our brands and, more importantly, each other
across countless digital, social and mobile touch points, along with the long digital shadow cast
by the rapidly expanding “Internet of Things” that distributes bits of processing power into
everything from our cars to our clothing, and you start to get a true sense of the volume of
unfiltered, unstructured and, some would argue, unmanageable information that threatens
to overwhelm us, as it promises to empower us.
Statistician Nate Silver, author of The Signal and the Noise, shines a spotlight on just how big
Big Data can be when he writes, “Every day, three times per second, we produce the equivalent
of the amount of data that the Library of Congress has in its entire print collection.” But he
tempers his enthusiasm for scale with a sobering caveat: “Most of it is ... irrelevant noise. So
unless you have good techniques for filtering and processing the information, you’re going to get
into trouble.” In other words, Big Data is certainly plentiful and may be valuable, but it’s not
especially useful in its crude form. But like oil, which, in its mined and refined form, makes its
way into everything from adhesives to aspirin, lipstick to linoleum, plastic to parachutes and, of
Marketing Insights
1
September 2013
course, into the gasoline that fills our tanks, insights that we glean from Big Data will have an
unprecedented influence on both consumer culture and the corporate growth agenda.
It’s no secret that marketing leaders are being held to higher and higher standards of
accountability, and many recognize the role that data can play not only in improving results, but
also in fostering deep customer intimacy. It’s easy to understand why technology research firm
Gartner projects that by 2017, chief marketing officers will wield bigger technology budgets than
their IT counterparts do. In other words, it is fast becoming the marketer’s work to put Big Data
analytics to work for marketing. While bold claims like this point to a significant shift in how
technology decisions get made and have major implications for what it means to be a “D-suite
CMO”—a next-generation marketing leader who is digital to the core—they also distract from
the fundamental truth that Big Data represents a business advantage more than it does a
technological choice. For all of the breathless buzz about Hadoop clusters on the one hand and
all of the worrisome hand-wringing over processing power on the other, the real question for
marketers isn’t, “Where will we house it?” or even, “How will we crunch it?” It’s, “How will
Big Data empower us to serve our customers—and our companies—better than we could without
it?”
Just like oil, Big Data is not valuable for what it is, but for what it makes possible. It matters not
as a crude commodity, but as a prized currency for value creation in an age of hyperconnectivity. Let’s explore just five key ways that Big Data can be harnessed to create value as it
makes us smarter D-suite marketers.
Greg Verdino is a consultant, coach, author and speaker. His most recent book, microMARKETING: Get
Big Results by Thinking and Acting Small, was published by McGraw-Hill. Find him online at
GregVerdino.com and @gregverdino.
Marketing Insights
2
September 2013