The ‘big data’ myth and the pitfalls of ‘thick data’ opportunism: on the need for a different ontology of markets and consumption

ABSTRACT

The twin pillars of big data and data analytics are rapidly transforming the institutional conditions that situate marketing research. In response, many proponents of culturalist paradigms have adopted the vernacular of ‘thick data’ to defend their vulnerable position in the marketing research field. However, thick data proselytising fails to challenge several outmoded ontological assumptions that are manifest in the big data myth and it situates socio-cultural modes of marketing thought in a counterproductive technocratic discourse. In building this argument, I first discuss the relevant historical continuities and discontinuities that have shaped the big data myth and the thick data opportunism. Next, I argue that culturally oriented marketing researchers should promote a different ontological frame— the analytics of marketplace assemblages—to address how big data, or more accurately its socio-technical infrastructure, produces new kinds of emergent and hybrid market structures, modes of social aggregation, consumption practices, and prosumptive capacities.

KEYWORDS:

• Big data
• consumer culture theory
• ethnography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Rhetorically, ‘cultural analytics’ may be a more accessible and, hence, marketable alternative. In fact, I originally planned to entitle this essay ‘The cultural analytics manifesto’. Cultural analytics has semantic kinship with the now ubiquitous shibboleth of data analytics and draws attention to the process of interpretation, culturally oriented sense-making frameworks and the culturally contingent nature of marketing insights. On the downside, cultural analytics does not necessarily disrupt orthodox assumptions emanating from the humanistic, ‘deep meaning’, sovereign consumer legacy, unless accompanied by extensive elaboration on its flat ontology/dispersed agency orientation. The less elegant, but connotatively appropriate, moniker the ‘analytics of market assemblages’ does offer the ironic benefit of having the same acronym as the American Marketing Association.

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Notes on contributors

Craig J. Thompson

Craig J. Thompson is the Churchill Professor of Marketing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Craig’s research addresses the socio-cultural shaping of consumption practices, the gendering of consumer culture, and the dynamics of power and resistance that are enacted through the marketplace. He is co-author of the book The Phenomenology of Everyday Life, and co-editor of Sustainable Lifestyles and the Quest for Plenitude: Case Studies of the New Economy and Consumer Culture Theory. Craig is a Fellow of the Association of Consumer Research.