Big data seems to have much going for it, but does it kill creativity?

Big data is the latest to take the marketing world by storm. Marketers in the past few years have had access to abundant data from their own internal sources  such as from servers, vendor records, sales channels, in addition to data generated externally (e.g. customer interactions, the internet, social media etc).

However the question is, can all this data, which typically is at a very granular level (the level of a single customer or transaction), be used to add value to the business?

Big data as we may have realised by now, has been adding value to healthcare (e.g. tracking Ebola), financial services (fraud detection) and infrastructure (monitoring electricity usage). What about marketing then?

The opportunities that marketing could tap on from big data are huge. Big data, coupled with analytics, contributes to the pool of useful information that could be helpful for marketing. That by itself is of great value, as long as it’s distinguishable from the garbage. Extracting the gems from the deluge however is the key to successful marketing.

Just like product ideas, where the advertising and positioning strategy is a creative process, so too is building predictive and diagnostic models using big data. It cannot be treated like a soulless, mega number churning tool. That is the view of the uninformed.

How useful then is big data to business anyway? The earliest use of big data for business was in the United States, coming from the financial services and interestingly, the casino industry. As a result, Capital One (a financial services company) and Harrah’s (casino), both became leaders in their respective industries. Big data has also been used by the sporting teams there such as baseball, to acquire the right players.

How then can big data and analytics add value to businesses, especially on the marketing aspect?  Case studies have shown that it can improve the effectiveness of your marketing effort (up to 30%), by highlighting the good programs against the duds. It also optimise marketing spend.

It is already revolutionising research as of now, where brand tracks are being supplemented by the unsolicited customers’ voice. Internally, big data from sources such as ERP and POS systems are already helping to improve the hit rate when it comes to new product indents. Pricing the product at SKU levels can now be done in such a way that margins are added with no sales lost. Hence with a better knowledge of what is likely to work, the product success rates can be improved.

Big data also help marketers to gain a better understanding of the customers, as sales, loyalty and social media data can now be connected to provide marketers with a richer customer definition.

Big data seems to have much going for it, but does it kill creativity?

This might be a case of a misguided fear. Londoners in the late 1890s feared that given the number of horse drawn carts, London would be filled with dung that makes it impossible to move on the road.

The lesson here is that the opposite is true - analytics leads to a sharper brief which in turn leads to cutting edge advertising. The saying goes that, you can have the best creative minds, but if they do not know what to say, they can crash the brand more effectively.

Big data analytics simply adds information and tools to this mix and in the right hands – it can create magic.

This article was written by Manoj Tadepalli, director for RainMan Consulting Asia.

Manoj will be touching on ‘Big Data, Insights and Creativity: a new definition of success in marketing’ at the Big Data 2014 conference on the 11 November at the Four Seasons Hotel Singapore. Other speakers include senior experts from brands such as AIA, Dell, MasterCard Worldwide, Unilever and more.

To learn more about the conference and register, visit the website here.

For registration enquiries, you may contact Carlo Reston at +65 6423 0329, carlor@marketing-interactive.com.