It is not the planting or the harvesting that’s difficult, but knowing what to do with the bounty.
We have a plethora of information—more than any of us can truly digest. We’ve been planting questions for decades and harvesting observational data for hundreds of years. We’ve created automated cultivating systems to collect and store information from just about every region of our lives. The trouble is: we are victims of our own collection success. We have become so good at collecting and gathering that we are being overwhelmed by the bounty.
This same problem expressed itself with corn production here in the US. We produce far too much corn. The US subsidizes its farmers to produce corn to the tune of around $20 billion yearly. As a result, there is a glut of corn and not enough demand. So what did agri-business do? They invented new products by finding new ways to utilize corn. Innovative products include the dreaded high fructose corn syrup (found in many food products) and corn even found its way to serve as a fuel for our automobiles (ethanol). They did a great job—whether or not it is ethically right or wrong—by turning something that was beyond ubiquitous, and to the point of useless, into a variety of “somethings” in high demand.
How can we learn from this?
In short, the data/information (corn) is certainly there. A great example of this is online search data. Google captures nearly 60% of all online searches. That is real, unfiltered, unbiased behavioral information. Not only does Google dominate the search landscape they also give us free and easy to use tools to turn that “corn” into “ethanol”. So what are we going to do with these bountiful data?
Here are two free tools that you may or may not currently use. If you do use these tools, you know what a revelation they can be. If you haven’t, this may be how you spend the next few hours…sorry about that. These tools can be used as a great first step in any exploratory research phase. Let’s use the term “marketing research” as a guinea pig search term in our exploration of the following tools:
1. Google Trends: www.google.com/trends
As you can see, a 2 second query shows the search behavioral landscape. You can further see languages used and the countries that searched for that term as well as representative news items during peaks and valleys, which are selected to give you reference points. All this and geo targeting—for FREE!
2. Google Wonder Wheel: http://www.googlewonderwheel.com/
“Google wonder wheel by definition is a wheel display of relevant search terms. Clicking on one of the search terms will open a new wheel of relevant search terms and so on.” – Google
Simply go through your usual Google search regime and then on the results page look on the left hand sidebar under all results and select wonder wheel.
In Closing:
I have likened data to corn. Am I way off?
What do you do to make your data into ethanol?
Kyle Nel is manager, customer insights – food and small formats – at Walmart.
