“Businesses are drowning in data but starving for insights. Worse, they have no systematic way to consistently turn data into action.”

-“Digital Insights Are the New Currency Of Business”, Forrester Research, April 2015

“Big Data” is the term used to describe how advancing trends in technology will change the way information is delivered to businesses. A lot more data now exists. In fact, industry pundits note that 90% of the data that exists today was created in the last two years. And, with the sheer volume of social media and mobile data streaming in daily, businesses expect to use Big Data to aggregate all of this data, extract information from it, and identify value to clients and consumers.

The potential value for brands using these data assets is huge, but the opportunity of Big Data is also its challenge. We are drowning in data. And tweets, posts and video are not the structured data that fits well into relational databases for traditional querying. As a result, Big Data requires new ways of thinking about how to store and analyze information to extract insights, and turn those insights into actionable decisions.

The market research industry, especially qualitative research, has a key role to play in unlocking the value of Big Data, because when it comes to understanding consumers, market researchers are hard to beat. This is not about market researchers simply adding the ‘why’ to the ‘what’ of Big Data. There are much bigger roles for market researchers to play when it comes to Big Data.

Read more about the role market researches can play in in downloading our new eBook, Why Qual is Neccessary to Add Meaning to Big Data.