Why Creative Data Interpretation is Worthwhile

Well if I were you I would probably consider doing a combination of big data and what I call small data. Really big data is, of course, an accumulation of an enormous amount of data out there. Now here’s the issue, most of that data may be accurate, but it’s the interpretations of those which may be at fault. Your role is really to go in and understand those data, and use your instinct and creativity to extract information and correlations out of those because no one would have thought of that before. If you go into a supermarket for example, what we learned is that the correlation between people buying beer and men buying toilet paper were almost 100% that means men when they’re buying toilet paper always buy beer – don’t ask me why. Or people who buy toothpaste always buy tuna, or reverse, or you see those who buy calling cards always buy coconut oil in certain supermarkets. 

Now these correlations are hard to find without you having a hypothesis first. Your role as a marketer should be to be the creative mind coming up with hypothesis, to really be the conductor of all this information and say “what is my hypothesis?” And guess what? In many cases you’ll be wrong. But in 9 out of 10 cases you’ll actually realize that you’ve learned so much that the last time, or the last point, is so revolutionary that it changes your entire strategy. So if I should choose a lane I would be the conductor between off and online, between big data and small data, and between art and science.