Adoption of Big Data Technology for Innovation in B2B Marketing

Purpose of the paper: The paper explores use of big data in innovation and market leadership in B2B relationships. It provides a framework to analyze the impact of big data, supported by four case studies.Methodology/approach: This is a conceptual paper, supported by case studies, offering the opportunity for concept generalization. The case study organizations are innovating to stay ahead in the market and to expand activity, using big data to exploit marketing opportunities and create new offerings.Findings: Organizations are recipients of and are collectors of big data, partly created by the increasing volume of business and customer transactions online. The qualitative exploration of the cases shows that big data and its analytics and applications can be taken as indicators of organizations' ability to innovate to respond to market opportunities.Research limitations/implications: The online marketing environment is a dynamic one, where organizations must innovate to survive. A limitation is that the cases in the paper do not deal with those lagging in innovation, for whom survival is an issue. The paper's examples are limited to successful organizations where big data, data mining and analytics led to strategic business success.Practical Implications: B2B organizations that operate in markets where their own products or services have a significant impact on how the products and services of their B2B customers provide value to end (B2C) customers should, in their innovation activity, engage fully with the end B2C market, together with their B2B customers. This has implications in every area from strategy to human resources. If the B2B organization's pedigree includes B2C activity parallel to that of their customers but not competitive, this can give them an advantage in marketing, but if their B2C activities start to encroach on the B2C activities of their customers, this may cause conflict and loss of business. This implies that if marketing strategy becomes siloed between the different branches of the business, the potential for conflict increases.Originality/value of the paper: The paper's value is in contributing to understanding big data's role in business innovation, specifically in business to business organizations and where their innovation can transform customer experience at the end of the value chain, i.e., with final consumers. Therefore, the paper helps to address a research gap in the literature, which tends to focus on how such innovation affects business-to-business relationships.