In the last ten years, the world witnessed an increasing shift towards online business. As online retailers offered lucrative opportunities, consumers began to prefer the convenience of digital purchasing.
Sharp incline in digitization let to a huge influx of customers. This led to a stiff competition between various merchants. Numerous marketing strategies came into force to lure people towards their brand. And with this came the need to manage and utilize Big Data.
What exactly is Big Data and how important it is in the world of digitized marketing?
Big Data is any huge set of data which is beyond the capability of the usual databases used for sorting and relating data. For the past five years, Big Data has been the Big word. It’s been sought after like a pack of wolves. From small businesses to large, everyone wants to gain advantages by compiling, sorting and analyzing huge data.
Data analytic tools are used to find correlations and patterns between vast data extending up to zettabytes, which is not humanly possible. Different data mining and predictive analysis tools, optimization and mathematical algorithms are deployed to get the relevant details. These are then used to derive important trends and make ground-breaking decisions.
Where and how does Thick Data come into the picture?
What lacks in Big Data is that is it too technical. Since trade is solely client-centric, it becomes imperative to understand their needs and expectations. No amount of mathematical curves or principles can precisely predict the unpredictable human behavior.
This is where Thick Data comes into the picture. Thick data essentially bridges the gaps in Big Data. Where Big Data is quantitative, Thick Data is qualitative. It aims at understanding the emotional quotient of the consumers. Thus probing at the dynamic human behaviors and draws conclusions over what and when customers are most likely to make their purchases.
Amalgamation of Thick Data into Big Data
Thick Data takes quantitative data from Big Data and incorporates it into the evolving human approach. This helps organizations develop customer-centric methods and build positive relations with them.
A short example would be the decline in sales of Lego Toys which led them to conclude that kids were not interested in building toys anymore. A further human-level assessment, in the form of spending time with kids playing Lego, proved that there are some who enjoy building Lego blocks while some don’t. They are all different with separate needs.
Marketing with the union of Big Data and Thick Data
There are some methods employed to tackle the merger of Thick Data into Big Data :
• Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) – By exploring the compiled data specific undiscovered features are detected.
• Confirmatory Data Analysis (CDA) – This confirms the existing stats to be true or false based on human actions.
• Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA) – Qualitative Analysis deals with non-numeric data like pictures, videos or words to extract experiences of the customers.
There is no doubt that Big Data is the next Big thing in the world of marketing, but it is not complete. Graphs and Excel tables cannot provide human empathy. And Thick Data provides this missing human connection making it complete.