Big Data in Practice: An Explorative Study of how Big Data Relates to Market Orientation within the FMCG Industry

Abstract: An enormous amount of data is created, stored and analyzed every day, hour and second. Companies all over the globe are receiving trillions of bytes of information from their customers, spurring the interest for 'Big Data' and the opportunities it provides. But despite this immense enthusiasm, the academic research concerning Big Data's practical implications is limited. This study focuses on the FMCG industry, a historically data driven industry. Recent development on the market is taking the actors into the Big Data age, especially due to the increased use of loyalty card data. This study aims to create knowledge and a deeper understanding of how FMCG suppliers are utilizing Big Data as of today, and how their current practices are affected when the data landscape evolves. We strive to contribute to the limited academic research on Big Data by relating it to the phenomenon of market orientation. This research is conducted through a qualitative case study, where we carried out in-depth interviews with 11 Swedish FMCG suppliers. Our findings show that Big Data has implications for the studied firms' market orientation, since it is affecting how market intelligence is generated, disseminated and consequently affecting the responsiveness to that market intelligence. Additionally, we have highlighted the importance of the relationship between suppliers and retailers in the FMCG industry. The relationship with the retailers we argue, is partly determining how much value the suppliers can extract from Big Data, as it affects the way in which the data is used.