Stop Focusing On Big Data & Start Leveraging Thick Data.

What is Thick Data & Why It Matters To Your Marketing?

Thick Data is qualitative information (such as observations, feelings, and reactions) that offers insight into consumers’ daily emotional life. It is collected using ethnographic research. Thick data reveals people’s emotions, stories, and decision-making lenses. Compared to Big Data, it is only collected in smaller amounts - social listening is an effective way of collecting Thick Data.

What Thick Data provides is the perspective that Big Data misses. It provides insights into the complexity of meaning and emotionally-charged stories that impact audience decisions and increase customer empathy. It identifies biases your audience may have - I wrote about biases here and here.

As a result, combined with big data, it provides a more comprehensive picture of your target audience's wants, requirements, and preferences.

Big Data produces volumes of data from millions of customer data points to identify patterns at scale. In contrast, Thick Data uses smaller samples to reveal human-centered trends in greater depth. Thick Data attempts to foster compassion and understanding of humans between data points, whereas Big Data identifies patterns by separating factors.?

Thick Data is based on the social context of data points’ interconnections. It explains how people live their daily lives and why they have particular tastes.

The chart below illustrates the differences between the two types of data.

We experience the difference between Big Data & Thick Data in every sales message we receive on LinkedIn. We feel annoyed and sometimes angered because none of those people know us. Their messages are 100% self-serving and lack any empathy for what our needs may be. They are guessing. And we feel the insincerity.

Is Your Audience Feeling Like You Understand Them?

Empathy for your audience is the strongest competitive advantage you can have. The greatest brands did not build their legacy on attributes. They built it on their brand stories. Brand stories are created from Thick Data.

Lead with empathy! It is a differentiator few brand leverage.

As always, my goal is to provide you with actionable insights and inspire your success. I hope you found this read to be such. Please message me with any questions or comments on how I can serve you better.