Data-Driven Healthcare Marketing: Why It Needs Both Big Data and Thick Data

Healthcare marketers should no longer overlook the powerful qualities of qualitative or “thick” data that delivers rich, deep insights and meaning that quantitative data often can’t provide. Instead, healthcare organizations should aim to develop a data-driven healthcare marketing strategy that integrates both big data and thick data to unlock new opportunities for growth.

Daniel Fell, senior consultant at Optum

Some readers may recall the popular “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” campaign that ran in the early 2000s, a tongue-in-cheek parody of the differences between two popular computing platforms, one robust but slightly complex and one designed to be just as capable but a little easier to use.

Addressing the healthcare marketing professionals at the 28^th Annual Healthcare Marketing and Physician Strategies Summit in Austin, Texas in April, the ad was a good analogy for the way quantitative data, specifically big data, and qualitative or “thick” data as we referred to it, are sometimes viewed across organizations — that these two types of data are not only completely different but also competitive with each other.

Both are important to marketers, and when combined together for deeper analysis and better decision-making, they are even more powerful. Ultimately, both are increasingly essential in today’s fast-paced, data-driven healthcare marketing environment.

While they are inherently unique and do have different properties and applications in marketing, we see them as integrally linked and highly complementary. Marketers who aren’t thinking about using both today miss an opportunity to power smarter data-driven marketing.

In a new article, Dean Browell and Daniel Fell offer key insights on why big data and thick data are not competitors but rather powerful allies.

Read the full article to learn why a data-driven healthcare marketing approach integrating both qualitative and quantitative data is essential for success in today’s competitive healthcare landscape: Big Data vs. Thick Data: The Road to Data-Driven Marketing

Best regards,
Matt Humphrey
President