The fact that Big Data helps marketers in reach the last mile with respect to customer engagement has never been in doubt. This enormous data allows companies to track information regarding customer’s purchase history, media preferences, shopping habits, interests and ambitions. However, in several industries such as telecom, travel, insurance, automobile and music, the gap between competitors’ ability to conduct business analytics has more or less evened out leading to incremental advantages rather than strategic. Thus ways need to be found to optimize this data extracted. Startups are working on innovative solutions whose aggregations benefit unique sets but large number of people. Examples of such may be cited as INRIX, Zillow and In-Venture from Africa.

Source: https://hbr.org/2016/08/use-big-data-to-create-value-for-customers-not-just-target-them