Imagine working 10 years to become the lead marketing executive at a large retail organization only to find that your competitor is invading your market share by 20 percent each year. You quickly decide to launch several online marketing promotions while improving your products but find your efforts are fruitless as your competitor continues to steal your customers, destroying your profits while raising its own.

As you begin to analyze your competitor’s business strategy, you find that while you were focused on sales reports, productivity analysis, and other traditional marketing efforts, your competitor was making a massive investment in upgrading all of its management information systems. This included systems capable of collecting, storing, and analyzing data from every store, product, and sales representative in the market; in fact, your competitor now knows more about your products and sales cycles than you do. The new systems collect data not only throughout your competitor’s company but also from a group of suppliers, retailers, and distributors around the globe. These new systems provide your competitor with the ability to adjust prices instantly based on daily customer traffic patterns, reorder automatically from every entry in the supply chains, and even move items within a store or between stores for maximum selling efficiency.

Your competitor has won, and not because it had a higher-quality product or better sales and marketing strategies, but because it identified the value of management information systems coupled with the ability to instantly access big data within and beyond the organization. You quickly realize that your competitor’s big entry into marketing relied on offering a huge competitive advantage. You sigh as you realize your company is in big trouble because it did not understand the dynamics of the big data age.

We are all familiar with the information age and the improvements made to organizations around the world as they are able to better manage employees, track sales data, and analyze customer purchasing patterns. However, this scenario is an example of the game-changing impact of big data, the massive amounts of data being collected by humans and machines over the last few years. Companies are now capturing hundreds of terabytes of data on everything from operations and finances to weather patterns and stock market trends. Sensors are now embedded in everything from products and machines to store floors, collecting real-time data on operations and customers. Radical customization, continuous experimentation, and information-driven business models are the new fundamentals of competition as organizations analyze massive volumes of data. Data volumes are exploding, and more data has been created in the past 2 years than in the entire previous history of the human race. Here are the top 20 facts every manager should know about big data, according to Forbes magazine.

Data is growing faster than ever before. In 2021, 2 megabytes of new information is created every second for every human being on the planet.

Every second we create new data. For example, we perform 40,000 search queries every second (on Google alone).

Data is growing faster than ever before. In 2021, 2 megabytes of new information is created every second for every human being on the planet.

Every second we create new data. For example, we perform 40,000 search queries every second (on Google alone), which totals 3.3 billion searches per day, or 1.2 trillion searches per year.

In 2021, over 2.8 billion people used Facebook each day.

Facebook users send, on average, 31.25 million messages and view 2.77 million videos every minute.

Every minute, up to 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube alone.

3 billion smart phones are shipped yearly—all packed with sensors capable of collecting all kinds of data, not to mention the data the users create themselves.

Distributed computing (performing computing tasks using a network of computers in the cloud) is real. Google uses it every day to involve about 1,000 computers in answering a single search query, which takes no more than a second to complete.

Questions

List the reasons a business would want to display information in a graphical or visual format.

Explain how issues with low-quality data will impact big data.

Explain how a marketing department could use digital visualization tools to help with the release of a new product.

Categorize the five common characteristics and attributes of high-quality data and rank them in order of importance for big data.

Develop a list of possible practicable and highly sophisticated in marketing demographic.

Assess how a business could use a few of the data analysis techniques to understand how the business is operating.