HADOOPING THE MARKETING GAME

Big data allows marketers to define and describe their customers at a more detailed and precise level than it was even considered possible just a couple of years ago. With the speed this field is evolving, big data is becoming increasingly important in the marketing domain. While it is not a problem to collect the data, the problem remains to leverage these vast amounts of data, coming from different sources, in an efficient manner. Most marketing departments use many marketing applications, causing data fragmentation problems. This paper describes a different, data-driven approach that refers to this problem by using the Data Lake concept allowing the marketers to leverage data as their biggest and most valuable resource in a more agile and flexible manner. The goal is to collect the data, across all applications and channels, consolidate it and analyze all at once, regardless of source and type, which will enable a more complete picture of customer behavior than ever before, answer questions that were previously unanswerable, give rise to many other possibilities, and by extension – lead to more profit. We describe in detail the strategy and its benefits, give an overview of technologies in terms of functionalities inside the Data Lake architecture, and finally, we elaborate the advantages of this concept, in comparison to traditional marketing techniques, through some of the many use cases that show how this approach can respond to the challenges of marketing today and in the future