Researching the Ever-Changing World: Reflections on Big Data and Questions for Researchers in Marketing: An Abstract

Abstract

With the rise in data quantity, computational power, and storage capacity, Big Data is rapidly becoming a ubiquitous term within the lexicon of marketing academics and practitioners. Big Data is a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon that rests on the interplay of technology (maximising computational power/algorithmic accuracy to gather, analyse, link, and compare large data sets), analysis (using large data sets to identify patterns and make economic, social, technical, and/or legal claims), and mythology (belief that large data sets provide a higher form of intelligence/knowledge that can generate previously impossible insights with the aura of truth, objectivity, and accuracy) (boyd and Crawford 2012).

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Big Data, and the interpretation of structured and unstructured data that it affords, can provide wide-ranging information on which to base decision-making across organisations (Lohr 2012; Columbus 2016; Dawar 2016). Marketers can use Big Data to better understand consumers’ needs and then use this understanding to drive marketing decision-making (Chen et al. 2012; Tirunillai and Tellis 2014). To maximise the potential of Big Data, we, the research community, need to question our accepted conceptions about and practices with these data. This is difficult for researchers new to Big Data, as much of the literature focuses on technical issues.

In this paper we reflect on the potential issues of using Big Data in an ever-changing world by examining five topics in Big Data: (1) the implications of the prevalence of behavioural information, (2) the perception that more data is somehow better data, (3) the ideas of individual and group privacy, (4) the currency of data within the prevalent sociotechnical context, and (5) the impact of automation. We then propose questions that researchers in marketing should reflect on when considering the use of Big Data in their research:

• 1. Is the type of data available in the Big Data set appropriate for my research question?

• 2. How might the variety of Big Data impact upon my research?

• 3. How might the volume of data influence my research?

• 4. To what extent might Big Data compromise the privacy of those participants whom I wish to research?

• 5. What role is automation playing in my research?

• 6. How does the context influence my data?

• 7. What are the temporal constraints that are relevant to my research?

• 8. Can I access the skills necessary to mine the data?