Understanding Big Data and its application in the digital marketing landscape

Abstract

This chapter outlines the increasing prominence of Big Data and its application to marketing practice. The 8Ps of the Expanded Marketing Mix: Product, Price, Place, Promotion, Process, Physical evidence, Partnerships and People are applied as the lens in explaining the application of Big Data in contemporary marketing practice. Big Data is already guiding marketing decision-making at multiple levels, from analysing consumer buying behaviour to Internet-of-Things (IoT)-enabled devices that report on product use conditions, service requirements or processing data from manufacturing. In the future, Artificial Intelligence will become important in handling Big Data. In preparation for this, there is an urgent need for ethical design principles to be integrated into the capture, storage and use of Big Data as part of the entire data management process.