MERCADEO Versión en español
Mario Carrasco from ThinkNow Research: Big Data Is Missing Hispanics and Other Minority Populations
Manuela Walfenzao| 9 de febrero de 2017
Neville Kidd, director de Fotografía de Travelers
Mario Carrasco, Partner at ThinkNow Research – a culturally-integrated market research agency- wrote in MediaPost about the convergence between market research and marketing data, and as data gets bigger he wonders if it will become less inclusive. “The infrastructure for the future of marketing and marketing data is being built right now via big data. However, the construction of this infrastructure is excluding large segments of the population, like minorities” he said. He explained, for instance, that despite Hispanics over-index in mobile consumption, there is not sizable amount of marketing data available on them giving three reasons. The first is regarding location-based targeting, which is -for Carrasco- one of the most promising marketing tools to come out of the big data revolution. However, he said, this requires investments in time and money that some minority-owned business may not have access to or be aware of. So “you end up with a segment of the population underrepresented in the data collected from this marketing channel.” The second is Spanish search which -he wrote- in the U.S. is still largely overlooked. “Businesses have been slow to invest in Spanish search marketing and more broadly Hispanic digital efforts. This lack of investment has led to an underdeveloped pool of Spanish search data to pull from. In other words, English search is robust and ready for big data to take it to the next level from a marketing perspective, while in Spanish is not.” And third, transactional data. For Carrasco Hispanics over-index in cash transactions vs. other cohorts which means their transactional data isn’t being recorded by mobile payment or credit cards. “This leaves a huge gap for marketers and can lead to issues for market researchers relying on transactional big data for retail marketing” he said.
