Big data and the future of knowledge production in marketing research: Ethics, digital traces, and abductive reasoning

Abstract

If Big Data has been widely discussed, only a few marketing researchers have actually paid attention to it. However the development of Big Data, even in the abstract, provides researchers with the opportunity to rethink our approach to gathering and applying knowledge. Many countries, companies and universities are investing millions of dollars in the development of Big Data. Some believe this era of data driven computational social science has the same potential as the emergence of cognitive science in the 1960s and should not be left to private companies or government agencies. Given the entrance of Big Data techniques to companies and the university setting, it is our role, as consumer researchers, to identify issues that are relevant to our field and to suggest a consumer research method adapted to Big Data. The first section of this article addresses ethical and epistemic issues to consider when conducting marketing research with Big Data. The second section suggests the use of abductive reasoning as a first step in the research process in order to bring context to consumers’ digital traces and make new theories emerge. Finally, we present the archetype-based analysis as an example of what researchers can do with Big Data when they adopt abductive, inductive and deductive approaches in the research process.