The Big Deal about Big Data in Market Research

The term "Big Data" is getting a lot of attention
these days in business, but what does it mean exactly? What makes data
"big"?

Big Data refers to "data that is too large, complex,
and dynamic for any conventional data tools to capture, store, manage, and
analyze.' What makes Big Data challenging is the volume, variety, and velocity
of the data. It can come from any digital interactions among people, including
virtual communities, social networks, blogs, medical devices, digital TV,
e-commerce, bank cards, GPS devices, surveillance cameras, and more.

At last year's TMRE, Inderpal
Bhandari, Chief Data Officer & Vice President, Knowledge Solutions at
Express Scripts and Debjani Deb, co-founder and managing partner, EmPower
Research, sat down with IIR's Marc Dresner to discuss each company's use of Big
Data and its importance.

According to Bhandari, you can think of Big Data as the
advent of social media data that is now becoming available, which previously
never used to exist. This allows companies to get a window into the mind of
their key stakeholders.

'Now, you can look at the data as it unfolds in social media,
so as people are sharing their feelings you can try to understand what their
sentiment is around key entities that have business value,' he explained.

However, Deb said the challenge is taking the high volume, very
fast-growing data and marry it to internal repositories such as a call center,
a survey bank, a focus group, etc. because they are all trying to tell the same
story. And, one needs to be able to reconcile that story across all of those
data banks for each touch point.

How do you do it?

'It's two-fold,' said Deb. 'You have to use technology where
it belongs, and then you have to take it the extra mile using human analytics.'

Today, technology can take you about 65 percent the way
there, but afterwards, you must have human beings draw the insights of the true
meaning. According to Deb, over time this will get better.

'Technology will take larger leaps because this is a burning
problem for corporations,' she added. 'Over the next few years we will see
highly automated systems that will enable the agile decision-making that
companies will be looking for.'

The bottom line, according to Bhandari, is you have to
participate. You can't be left out because it is opening up a whole vista that
we never had access to. 'If you are able to inform your pricing strategy in
real-time and your competitor is not, you will be at a decided advantage to be
able to do it,' he said.