The Golden Nugget Chronicles

Golden Nugget and Big Data

 

Golden Nugget had been living quietly in the pond of Insights for many years. He kept himself to himself but was happy when he was occasionally discovered by a well-meaning Market Researcher who would turn him, if only briefly, into an insight for one of the Big-Clients in the Cloud.

For a while he would bask in the glory of being an “insight with business impact”, not many insights got that privilege, but then after a while the glamour would fade and he’d return to his mundane but happy existence.

Up in the Cloud the Big-Clients had been busy however, gorging themselves on data – social media chatter, email, videos, mobile research, GP etc. The Cloud was reaching saturation point. There was no room for Nugget, where would he fit in with this instantaneous malarkey? And how were the Big-Clients even supposed to know Nugget existed? They were just going where the ‘big data’ took them. Whereas before the population of the pond had been measured by megabyte, (something Nugget had tried but failed to comprehend) it was now talked about in terms of zettabytes. This dizzying progress left Nugget sore and he had no idea how he’d ever fit into this. Every second his little friend Dustie the Data came past to inform him on a “newbie”.

Nugget was not impressed.

“Nugget stop whining about it. It’s the brave new world! The Big-Clients just want to use all these insights to engage with their customers. And rather than giving them what they thought they wanted they’ll deliver what they really want - improved product quality, new innovations, better customer service and better delivery. This is good Nugget”

And so Dustie left Nugget to stew.

All Dustie had said seemed irrelevant to Nugget. No benefits would be coming to him, not at all.

The Cloud was brimming now. It had become a sea of information that even the Big-Clients were struggling to comprehend. The Market Researchers couldn’t keep control of it. They were just trying to keep on top of it, let alone make something of it.

They struggled with how fast it came, bombarding them second, by second.

When they did manage to capture and store it they weren’t sure what to do with it. They had to rely on machines to analyse it … machines that constantly misunderstood irony and sarcasm and gave entirely the wrong meaning to the information.  It was all coming from different places as well and they hadn’t been trained in comparing apples and pears.

When the client finally received this information it wasn’t the Holy Grail they had hoped for but a mass of mismatched, out of date and wrongly interpreted data that didn’t help them with their strategy at all.

In the far corner of the Cloud was a group of Market Researchers who knew how to look at “big data”. They had a big tool box of online tools to capture the data and other tools such as video diaries, online focus groups and mobile surveys with which to delve deep into and understand the data. They had the human analytical skills that could turn the information into useful insights. They liked to match make and marry different pieces of information together so that the combination was greater than the sum of the parts. Most importantly, they were trained to mine for the information that would be useful for the Big-Clients in the context of their business strategy, and truly make a difference.

And so little by little the data got captured, organised and turned into truly impactful insights and order was restored to the world. And everyone, including Nugget who married a very attractive YouTube video, started to live happily again……..