Big data in marketing services and products: Impacts of Marketing and Ethics

There has been a growth in studies focused on the implication that the use of Big Data may enhance firms’ performance by delivering streamlined resources and customer services. There is a need for more research focused on understanding how big data influences marketing to provide better customer value which is the aim of this chapter. It also explores the ethical aspects of big data applications and processing. To do so, we discuss issues pertaining to the usefulness and challenges for the adoption of marketing analytics, ethics considerations in the hospitality and tourism industry. Improved customer services, product offerings and tailor-made solutions to upskill and deliver better value to businesses are investigated. Then, ethical issues such as data ownership, customer identification, data governance were highlighted.

Overall, there are current concerns about the use of big data within the hospitality and tourism industry as to its usefulness and corresponding investments required. There are different understandings of the usefulness of big data, due to varying definitions of the phenomenon. In this chapter we emphasize specifically on marketing analytics for big data tourism analytics focusing on the use of big data analytics, marketing, and ethics issues. Finally, suggestions on how tourism managers can create value with big data analytics will be provided and some ethical considerations will be discussed.