Jo Bowman
How useful is big data – and is the best yet to come?
We’ve all gasped at the story of the department store Target sending a US teenager offers for baby products before even she knew she was pregnant. We’ve come to count on supermarkets sending us vouchers we actually want to use and on Amazon to make its uncannily astute suggestions.
But beyond a few success stories, just how much difference is big data making to businesses?
Steve Needel, managing partner with Advanced Simulations, is yet to be convinced that big data is a big deal, and he thinks the promise of what can be achieved by mining masses of data has been “over-hyped beyond belief.” Often, he says, it is simply a new name for work that’s been done for decades: looking for patterns in data sets, perhaps linking TV people-meter data with purchase behaviour. Usually, he claims, the promise of big data goes beyond what current data sets, however vast, can actually generate. Most data, he asserts, can’t really be linked in a meaningful way, because individuals use multiple shops, credit cards, media outlets, e-mail accounts and other identifying information. The link between exposure to a pivotal message or event and a later purchase is as difficult to pinpoint as ever.
“For all the red flags that [Target] raised and the brouhaha it engendered, it was a brilliant application. But you don’t see many of those,” Needel observes. “You don’t see clients anywhere saying, ‘We took this massive data set that we had, we analysed it … and now we market the product this way or created this new product.’”
Mike Sherman, a Hong Kong-based marketing insights and big data consultant, agrees that big data has useful applications, but expectations of what it can do are often unrealistic. “There’s a lot of excitement about big data being something very different. It creates expectations that all of a sudden there’s lots of stuff that can be done that couldn’t be done before and that you don’t have to think as much because that data does it for you,” he says.
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