Big Data is Rocket Science

I wrote a post in the “Steve Jobs” thread because I believe it is the next step in understanding our audience. I think marketing will split into two distinct functional disciplines that “won’t understand” each other. One side is creativity/divergent thinking, that this course is designed to address. The other side is research that I think will become much more scientific going forward with Big Data being used in ways that we can’t even imagine at this point. An interesting observation for me was that there was a somewhat negative tone around Big Data that I detected on the thread. Someone commented that they were tired of hearing about it and someone else said they read comments up to the one about Big Data and stopped. Is it making people’s eyes glaze over? Is it promising and not delivering? Initially I titled this thread “Big Data | Is it a “big black box”” and no one even opened the thread. This hinted at this “separation of mind share” from “creatives” on one side to “analyticals” on the other. They don’t really “get” each other.
How useful can Big Data be? Game changing.
One of my favorite movies is “Margin Call” (released 2011). I will use it as an analogy of just how powerful Big Data can be. In the movie, a junior financial risk analyst with a Ph.D. in Physics, sees an ominous pattern within a mathematical model. That early detection turns out to be critical to the very survival of the firm he works for, and allows it to sidestep one of the worst financial disasters in history.
It was an “a-ha” moment for me when I realized this is also the future of marketing research. Firms will jostle for an advantage based on patterns they find within data so complex only someone with a Ph.D. in Physics can interpret them. It is literally the proverbial “Rocket Science”.
It’s very exciting, but also quite daunting. Most of us won’t have a clue how conclusions are derived, but once the ideas are boiled down, I think the insights will be remarkable and will lead to competitive advantage.