Choosing Brand Elements to Build Brand Equity
Brand equity is the result of a process which leads to a creation of a unique and distinct brand identity. These brand identifiers are referred to as brand identifiers. Brand identification can be done through various ways; for example, Unique Selling Proposition (USP), Logo, Style, Brand Ambassador, Etc. Brand elements facilitate the process of consumer […]
External Relationships
Introduction An organization is concerned with maintaining a healthy relationship with suppliers and customer, with whom they interact daily. However, for an organization to be successful, it has to maintain healthy and fruitful relation with all the stakeholders. These stakeholders may or may not be directly involved in the market. But they impact how business […]
Live for Your Customer
Take the case of any organization that is considered to be a global leader or a product leader and you will find that the recipe for success lies in the customer centered culture and approach that has been built up in the Company. The customer orientation is not limited to customer service or the front […]
New Product Pricing
Pricing is an important parameter; organizations need to take care of while launching a new product or service in the market. Before deciding the price of a new product, it is essential for organizations to understand and also calculate total costs involved in the entire process of the product development be it designing, manufacturing or […]
United Nations Millennium Development Goals and their Implications for Corporates
What are the United Nations Millennium Development Goals? The United Nations (UN) Millennium Development goals (MDGs) are a set of goals that were signed into an agreement with the member countries of the UN related to human development, eradication of poverty, providing access to basic services like food, shelter, and clean water to the underprivileged […]
If marketers had all the data about consumers that they can then use to predict consumer behavior, which would be the marketers dream come true. Until now, marketers had enough data about consumers that they then modeled to arrive at probable consumer behavior decisions. This data culled from marketing research was adequate until now when the extrapolation of the trends could translate into predictions of consumer behavior.
However, in recent years, marketers are going one-step ahead and instead of extrapolating data to predict consumer behavior, they are now turning to Big Data or data about virtually all aspects of consumers that would help them in predictive analytics or the art and science of accurately mapping consumer behavior.
In other words, Big Data is all about how marketers collect everything possible about consumer behavior and predict not only consumer behavior but predict what they are doing and how they would behave in future. For instance, Big Data provides marketers with the ability to identify the state of the consumers as can be seen in the recent prediction by the retailer giant, Target, about a woman being pregnant based on her consumer buying data.
This is the promise of Big Data that goes beyond merely extrapolating trends, instead, identifies, and predicts the next move of the consumer based on his or her current state. This would be like getting inside the minds of the consumers and instead of merely knowing what they would probably purchase, marketers would know with accuracy about what consumers are likely to do in the future.
The term Big Data has been coined because it gives marketers the bigger picture and at the same time lets, they model consumer behavior at the micro level. The integration of the macro data and the micro trends gives marketers’ unparalleled access to data, which can then be used to accurately predict consumer behavior.
The collection of Big Data is done not only from the consumer buying behavior but also from mining all the available data in the public and private domains to arrive at a comprehensive picture of what the consumers think and how they act.
The promise of Big Data is boundless for marketers who can now think ahead of the consumers instead of the other way around as well as preempt possible consumer behavior by targeting products aimed at the future actions of the consumers.
Of course, the promise of Big Data also comes with its perils as the tendency to be the master of consumer behavior can lead to serious issues with privacy and security of the data available with the marketers.
The example of Target predicting whether the woman was pregnant or not based on her shopping habits was received with both enthusiasm as well as alarm. The enthusiasm was from the marketers whereas the alarm was from the activists and experts who deal with privacy and security of data.
The point here is that Big Data places enormous responsibilities on marketers and hence, they have to be very careful about the data that they hold and the prediction models and simulation that they run.
If they chose to predict whether someone is going to do something next based on the results from the model, this prediction can also be used for unwelcome purposes and as can be seen in the recent revelations about tracking and surveillance, the data can be compromised or used to target innocent consumers. This is the reason why many experts are guarded as far as Big Data is concerned and they are waiting for the marketers and the regulators to frame rules and policies on how Big Data can be used in practice.
Finally, it must be mentioned that whichever stance one might have about Big Data, the potential uses of it for predicting the outbreaks of diseases and controlling crime are indeed boons to the regulators and the law enforcement agencies and therefore, it would be better for all stakeholders to decide on the kind of purposes for which Big Data can be used.
Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *
