Generally, big data of companies are profile and transactional data of customers of the particular company. Those data covers demography, te.g., gender, age, occupation and transactional data with the company, e.g., products bought, price paid, date and time of buying. Mostly, big data is used to explain the picture of ‘What?’ (e.g., Who are customers? What do they do?).

On the other hands, marketing research usually studies attitudes, comments, satisfaction of customers. It normally explains the picture of ‘How?’ and ‘Why?’ (How did it happen? Why did it happen?). Consumers studied in marketing research could be the customers of a company, and those of competitors, while big data in a company normally doesn’t have competitor data.

These 2 things, thus, complement each other to fulfill more robust insight.