You have relationships with your friends, family, and even your pets at home. These relationships drive you, inspire you to make decisions, and influence the way that you view information.
But what if companies wanted to form relationships with you based on the data that they have gathered from digital platforms?
Ultimately, Big Data encompasses all of the information that has been gathered about you on digital platforms. This could include social media platforms, web browsers, mentions, emails, etc. The three V’s—volume, velocity, and variety-set big data apart from traditional data (Paharia, 2017).
The Collection and Analysis of Big Data
Sometimes you can wander through a large book shop or department store and wonder how so many items can be stored in the digital system of a single shop. The amount of data that is processed on a daily basis, blows the number of books on a shelf out of the water. Many companies have more data stored than the amount of books that are in the Library of Congress (Paharia, 2017).
If you were to open up an internet browser right now and type in a simple sentence, your data would be analyzed. A few forms of how big data is analyzed is through cluster analysis, A/B testing, or crowdsourcing.
You cannot keep all of your data from being used to influence the marketing materials that you receive and the media that you are exposed to.
It is incredible how Big Data can help companies to understand consumer trends and how to market their products based on the data that they have received. In an article from the Wall Street Journal, it is mentioned how Levi Strauss & Co. used thousands of data points from Google Cloud to predict future purchasing trends (Bousquette 2025).
“For the first time, he said, Levi’s was able to continuously pull together data from 110 countries and 50,000 points of distribution—only 1,100 of which were Levi’s own stores” (Bousquette 2025).
You have most likely purchased something in the last month that was recommended to you based on the data that was gathered about your preferences.
The Tools Used to Visualize Data
Humans are visual creatures. Although data is very helpful in number form, having graphs, charts, and databases that help us to understand the patterns of data is very useful in deciphering what is important.
Visualization is a skill that you can use to make sense of your goals, dreams, and desires. The same techniques are used for data analysis through visualization software such as the Tableau Software.
Tables such as the one above help us to understand patterns of consumer purchasing habits, which products to recommend, and even which employees to hire. Data is all consuming and visualizing the trends allows the information to be sorted efficiently.
Big Data in the Workplace
Big data is not just used to influence consumer behavior, but it can also be used to drive employee engagement. The data can be used to increase your motivation, reward your tasks, and even personalize the experience of the software that you use.
Your manager can even make the teams in the workplace more efficient based on your strengths and weaknesses. Data feeds information to the managers and even help employees to progress towards goals. This can increase motivation and drive.
“What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.” – Zig Ziglar
Achievements increase the neurotransmitters in the brain associated with rewards and happiness. Data can help to influence the brain’s desire to achieve great things and work towards goals.
Everything can be personalized to your desires, needs, strengths, and weaknesses. This is the power of big data. It is not just numbers in the computer, but it is an accurate system to predict what comes next.
Data is everywhere. The question for companies to ponder over is what they are going to do with the endless amount of information.
Will your company accurately leverage data to influence consumers and employees, or will they let vital information fall through the cracks?
The choice is up to us, but we have more influence than we have had during any other time period on earth and we can use that to our advantage.
References
Paharia, Rajat. Loyalty 3.0 : How Big Data and Gamification Are Revolutionizing Customer and Employee Engagement. 1st edition, McGraw-Hill Education, 2013.
Bousquette, I. (2025, January 27). How tech helped Levi’s ride the ‘baggy jeans’ trend. The Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-tech-helped-levis-ride-the-baggy-jeans-trend-f290721d?
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