Abstract
This study examines the experience of marketing departments to become fully data-driven decision-making organizations. We evaluate an organic approach of departmental sensemaking and an administered approach by which top management increase the influence of analytics skilled employees. Data collection commenced with 15 depth interviews of marketing and analytics professionals in the US and Europe involved in the implementation of big data analytics (BDA) and was followed by a survey data of 298 marketing and analytics middle management professionals at United States based firms. The survey data supports the logic that BDA sensemaking is initiated by top management and is comprised of four primary activities: external knowledge acquisition, improving digitized data quality, big data analytics experimentation and big data analytics information dissemination. Top management drives progress toward data-driven decision-making by facilitating sensemaking and by increasing the influence of BDA skilled employees. This study suggests that while a shift toward enterprise analytics increases the quality of resource available to the marketing department, this approach could stymie the quality of marketing insights gained from BDA. This study presents a model of how to improve the quality of marketing insights and improve data-driven decision-making.
Highlights
The promise of leveraging big data and analytics capabilities in a firm’s strategy has increased the pressure on marketing departments to make data driven analytics central to marketing decision-making
Drawing on enactment theory [11], we argue that marketing departments have been engaging in sensemaking to understand and master marketing big data analytics (BDA) analytics
The average variance extracted (AVE), indicating the percentage of variance attributed to each construct rather than random error, range from 0.63 for external knowledge acquisition to 0.77 for top management support
Summary
The promise of leveraging big data and analytics capabilities in a firm’s strategy has increased the pressure on marketing departments to make data driven analytics central to marketing decision-making. Top management has ramped up pressure on marketing departments to develop analytics capabilities that take them from occasional market research studies to continuous use of integrated customer transaction data, including web surfing and social media activity. Far, much of the progress of marketing departments in utilizing big data analytics (BDA) has come primarily from picking the “low hanging fruit” of analytics provided by external digital service suppliers such as advertising and social media platforms. A McKinsey & Company study reports that profiling customers by their web surfing history and customizing digital advertising to reach them can increase digital marketing return on investment (ROI) by 250% [2]. Marketing departments can access a variety of external advertising analytics services that optimize targeting and advertising spend among their digital media channels [3]
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