Marketing strategies: Emergent ways of capturing and benefiting from consumer data

Why study this

Consumer data – the personal, behavioural and demographic information companies collect about their customers – reflect changes in consumers' attitudes and preferences. Capturing and exploiting this data is thus a key competitive aspect for companies in creating a 360-degree view of their customers and improving their marketing campaigns. However, this task has become increasingly complex because the proliferation of new technologies and consumer touchpoints (both physical and digital) have created exponential amounts of data. In order to process, manage and extract value from the tremendous amounts and diversity of data collected, a cohesive understanding of the role of consumer data in marketing is necessary. 

Findings

• The researchers considered two main aspects to categorize consumer data in marketing: forms of data disclosure (declarative versus non-declarative) and usage of the data by the company (primary versus secondary). 
• Declarative data are disclosed through loyalty programs, consumer panels, and more recently user-generated content in the form of comments on social media or participation in online brand communities, whereas non-declarative data are behavioural traces such as transaction data, website traffic, eye-tracking data, etc.
• Primary usage of consumer data reflects the company activities intended to gain marketing intelligence through market research activity, whereas secondary usage of data, which tend to be unstructured (e.g. location or clickstream data) are not actively collected but are the by-product of the customers' activity during their journey. 
• Computing and analysis technology, data digitalization and tracking technology development have facilitated the expansion of both types of data. 
• Concerning academic literature, research using declarative, company secondary usage data is normalized, such data having become a legitimate decision support source in marketing intelligence. 
• Non-declarative, company primary usage data is evolving at a slower pace, especially in physiological data research (via electroencephalograms and fMRI), likely because of the cost and difficulties of collecting relevant data. 
• Despite the practical relevance of non-declarative company secondary usage data, these are mostly under-exploited in academic marketing research. The authors expect this emergent area to gain more presence as tracking technologies and applications become more connected.