Direct 2.0

Just about everyone knows that Steve Jobs had a distain for market research and “big data”. We quote -- “We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.”

Just as we, Steve Jobs was an entrepreneur and risk taker. He trusted his instincts and was willing to go where others dared not. So why should we rely on data, mere bits and bytes, when it was distained by one of the greatest innovators ever?

Because data is today fundamental to what we do… a strategic asset that can and should be leveraged to achieve competitive advantage. And as our title suggests, data comes in various shapes and sizes all of which are essential to digital-era success. Read on to learn more about big data, little data, and all the data in between and how they can be used to your advantage.

Big data is the guide that lets your gut decide

To get a sense of what “big data” is, consider the vast, fragmented, often underutilized storehouses of information that businesses collect from online and off-line POS systems, product registrations, customer service call logs, and the like. Then, add the exabytes of real-time info generated as individuals engage with brands and more importantly, with each other, across digital, social and mobile touch points.  And don’t get us on the big data governments are now collecting on us all.

Big data is today of such unprecedented volume, variety and velocity that it strains even the largest enterprise’s capacity to extract deep insights and actionable understanding. It is not valuable for what it is but for what it makes possible. It’s the insights we glean from it that will have unprecedented influence on how we serve consumers. And what’s most exciting is that this is being enabled today by technology that allows data to be inexpensively transformed from its raw state to a usable form.

That said, big data does more than reduce marketing to a formulaic numbers game. By serving up substantive and previously hidden insights, big data may actually allow marketers to become more creative, to embrace innovation more wholeheartedly, and to understand the consumer so fully that even right brain-generated breakthrough ideas carry less risk and promise more reward than ever before. In the end, your ultimate payoff will come not from the fact that you’ve mastered big data, but in the reality that you’ve achieved big understanding.

And what, pray tell, is “little data”?

This really is a misnomer, because what we are referring to here is one’s own individual data in a personal context, as in “that’s my data, keep your hands off it”. Determining who actually owns your data and your right to data privacy are being hotly debated today in legislative bodies all over the world.

In the context of what computational social scientists are envisioning as future “open-source” data repositories that will house information on us all, with each packet of data individually coded with info on how it was collected and from whom, our individual data may one day be openly accessible and sold on our behalf if we opt to make it available. In this scenario, data is viewed as global electronic currency actively traded to the benefit of the individual data owner who will actually own, control and ultimately profit from the use of her personal information.

We keep hearing that there’s no such thing as bad data, only bad uses of data. Technologies used to collect data – POS, click-stream, location-based tracking, etc., and technologies used to leverage and store that data, need to balance the needs of innovative entrepreneurs with well-intended privacy advocates because if unchecked, privacy zealots could very well get the best of us. So what we advise is that you use but not abuse data because if we do not regulate ourselves, others will.

 And how about “all the data in between”?

In our view, this is the most important data of all because what we are talking about here is performance data -- from Google Analytics to the simple task of counting the number of times the phone rings and how prospects convert to leads and eventually to customers. Your ability to quickly react to performance data and use it to optimize your programs will lead to increased efficiency (lowered costs per sale) and effectiveness (increased number of sales) over time. Failure to do so will almost always lead to sub-optimized performance and ROI.

We’d bet (if we were betting types) that Steve and Woz (and Ron Wayne too, who gave up his share of Apple, the company he co-founded, for a total of $800!) would today leverage data -- big, small and in between – to their advantage. We think you should too.

This blog entry is an extract from our ebook, "Rocket Fuel to Ignite Your Business".