By Andrew Dalglish - 28th March 2014
A new report from Circle Research and dnx confirms the view that Big Data is the next revolutionary force in marketing. 43% of marketers are already mining petabytes of customer data to uncover hidden insights into behaviour; a further 40% plan to embrace Big Data’s benefits in the next three years.
Here’s the good news for the market research community.
The report reveals that marketers feel three skills are critical if they want to become CEOs of the future:
Market researchers are perfectly placed to support their marketing cousins in the first and third area.
However, the report also reveals two threats (or I’d rather view them as opportunities) for researchers.
First, marketers that have embraced Big Data report that it’s fundamentally changing how they view and engage with customers:
So whilst at the moment marketers naturally turn to the research industry to understand customer behaviour, with the rising importance of Big Data researchers could find themselves superseded by data specialists or even the IT department. This suggests that the skill set needed by a researcher in 2020 is likely to be very different to the skill set they need today.
Second, marketers report that the biggest challenge to unleashing Big Data is a lack of appropriate skills in the marketing department. Perhaps because of this, only 22% say that marketing ‘owns’ Big Data; the rest either share responsibility (35%) or it sits with data (17%) and IT departments (13%).
Again this has important implications for researchers. Marketers, often working with researchers, have historically been the bridge to the customer. But if IT and Data departments are taking control of Big Data and the customer insight it brings, this changes the dynamic. It may well be that in 2020 researchers work as closely with IT professionals as they do Marketers.
Download the full report here: /report/big-data-b2b-marketing/
Find out more about Circle Research’s B2B marketing research services here.
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Andrew has specialised in B2B research for over a decade and co-founded Circle Research in 2006. He is a columnist for B2B Marketing Magazine, a regular contributor to Research Live and frequent speaker at leading events such as the B2B Leaders Forum, Customer Experience Live and the Social Media World Forum. Andrew is a Chartered Member of the MRS, teaches the MRS B2B research course and holds an MA in Psychology from Aberdeen University alongside an MSc in Marketing from Strathclyde University.
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