Online MR Magazine May Edition 2016 Issue 1 | Page 17

#Big MR - From Big Data to the Big Picture… How can we deliver actionable advice from data? Quality at speed is of course possible, with necessary knowledge, budget and the resource. To begin, with the mammoth amount of data being thrown at a market researcher today - how can information be derived from this chaos? Darren Mark Noyce: Very good question and a great place to start. Our clients at Skopos are mostly large brands and organisations, who are daily bombarded with more data and data sources than ever nowadays, What with the emergence of internal customer (behaviour) analytics, website analytics, social media streams, plus the more traditional campaign and market research trackers, projects, etc. Careful selection, control and the triangulation is largely our philosophy for handling this, although being adaptable in this changeable world also helps we find. With the new large (big) datasets from internal sources where this is disparate and too large to data-mine in one go, we recommend carefully and ideally scientifically selecting (or sampling) the data so it is relevant and representative, and in smaller volumes – so it is more manageable (whilst still being representative and trustworthy). Essentially utilising our strengths as Market Researchers in science and data management to co-ordinate the data sources and analysis for our clients. Triangulation is our approach to ensuring the “truth” (or reality) is seen and understood from the multiple perspectives now possible, whether it be website user behaviours, social media posts or market research feedback. Often these align quite easily, but sometimes