As power shifts from brands to consumers, knowing your consumer has never been more important. But brands are often clouded by big data.In the post-advertising world, many brands struggle to understand the people they’re selling to and why they behave as they do. As power shifts from brands to consumers, knowing your consumer has never been more important. Even the accounting firm PwC has woken up to the fact that “every industry participant will need to invest in customer understanding and engagement.”
But so long as this point is couched solely in data-analytics terms, it tells only part of the story.
It’s easy to feel lost and, oddly, reassured by the introduction of “big data” (defined by Gartner as volume, velocity and variety), or colossal swaths of demographic, behavioural and customer-preference numbers. History is littered with examples of how the misuse of big data can precipitate poor decision making on a massive scale. The U.S. military’s overreliance during the Vietnam War on quantified data at the expense of human observation in the field is a classic case (read Brian Bergstein’s piece in the MIT Technology Review [20 February, 2013] for background). In a different context, data-harvesting giant Tesco’s handling of the recent horse-meat crisis reveals that having a wealth of available data but little empathy for your audience and their world can obscure the bigger picture, thereby impeding effective decision making.
Recent studies indicate to behavioural economists that people don’t make decisions or act according to reason (read Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow [2011] for a seminal exploration of the factors that do influence human decision making)....
Some very nice points, but I would like to see some other examples other than Nike and Red Bull.....