Enlightened marketers are now referring the “Age of The Customer”, which is defined by consumers holding all the advantages as they have real-time information about pricing, product features and competitors. The “Age of The Customer” has promoted the everyday consumer to the role of an empowered customer where not only consumer shopping behavior has changed, but also the way we market to these consumers. Empowerment as a direct result of technology adoption, has given a single individual, your customer, the power to choose how, when, and what they desire in terms of marketing.

According to a recent article in Information Week Magazine, research firm IDC predicts that the size of data – what it calls the “digital universe” – will grow to 2.7 zetabytes in 2012, up 48 percent from 2011’s record year. Data collection and storage is growing exponentially and the topic of Big Data is at the forefront of nearly every strategic enterprise discussion these days...

With all this talk about how to handle and process Big Data, how to derive insight and analytics from Big Data and how to store Big Data, there is little conversation around what to do with Big Data after you finally have it.

In this era of Big Data, collecting customer data is key; however, not having an effective customer analytics strategy could be a giant blunder for organizations of any size...