In the last weeks, I outlined several Big Data benefits by industries. The next posts, I want to outline use-cases where Big Data are relevant in any company, as I will focus on the business functions.
This post’s focus: Marketing.
Marketing is one of the use-cases for Big Data, which are discussed controversial. One the one hand, it gives opportunities to companies to adjust offers to their customers and make the offers more “individual”. I will describe the themes here before I will discuss the downsides of this.
With customer loyalty programs, companies can better “target” their customers. When the company understands the behaviour of the customer, special offers and promotions can be sent to the customer. We all know this from large online shops, where you get regular offers by e-mail. But this also applies to retail stores around you: with programs from the retailers, they also collect data about their customers and can improve the portfolio. Furthermore, they can make their advertisement more individual – and increase the revenue. Marketing gets valuable insights for all industries. Retail is the most common, but also other industries that are not in retail can gain benefits from it. Companies that work in B2B can create value from Big Data by adjusting their sales processes adjusted by data – and react to new trends before competitors find out.
On the other side, this is somewhat frightening. I am basically in favour of Big Data. However, there must be some kind of assurance that personal privacy is respected. At present, it is hard to opt-out of such programs.
Big data has potential in all areas within an organization. According to respondents in the CSC CIO Survey, 75% believe analytics and big data has a positive impact on productivity and efficiency. The key is being open to the analytics and working together to come up with the right queries. Peter Fretty, IDG blogger working on behalf of CSC