Marketing is changing, design is changing and businesses and how they work are changing and these changes are happening quickly driven by technology. I’ve already published some thoughts on what I call the big data approach to branding and what it means for you and your business. But here are some thoughts to help you get your head around what’s different in the approach, and how it can help you grow your business.
‘The techniques of correlational analysis are being aided and enhanced by a fast-growing set of novel approaches and software that can tease out non-causal relationships in data from many different angles – rather like the way cubist painters tried to capture the image of a woman’s face from multiple viewpoints at once.’
From Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think, London, 2013.
If you consider how you normally measure your customers, or even your social media engagement, you probably gather information from a single fixed viewpoint, such as the number of sales in a given period, or the number of Twitter followers. But what happens if you take a Cubist mindset, realising that your users, your customers and your potential business targets are dynamic, fluid, and changeable? You begin to understand that it’s more useful to take a multiplicity of viewpoints to communicate and engage with them in a more meaningful way. This is where the Cubist metaphor is very useful.
A big data approach to managing your business lets you see your business and your customers more ‘in the round’ – from as many different viewpoints as possible. This gives you a multi-dimensional view that’s more valuable when you’re making important business and brand decisions such as launching new products, or planning new campaigns.
It helps tell you what your business is doing now and in the near future, and it’s based on correlational analysis which gives you a good idea what your users and your customers will be doing too. Leaving the aesthetic considerations aside, big data gives you a Cubist viewpoint that you simply don’t get from being static and rooted in place and time.
A big data approach to managing your business lets you see your business and your customers more ‘in the round’ – from as many different viewpoints as possible.
If this sounds like a nice theory that’s of little practical value, then think about this. I’ve found that our own business is growing as we’re gathering new insights and making new data and technology-driven connections that more traditional design agencies normally miss out on. It’s an approach that’s helping us grow and develop in new and often unexpected ways.
Knowing more and knowing it faster, seeing your business and your clients and future clients from a range of different viewpoints, gives you a very valuable business advantage. So imagine what a Cubist approach could do for you today.
