First things first. How big is big data? While there is no easy or direct way to answer this, consider this for size – based on a 2013 estimate, the big 4 companies (Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft) alone stored roughly 1000 petabytes of data. That’s a million million megabytes! This estimate neither accounts for the amount of information stored by businesses that have evolved since nor academia. Obviously, not all of that information is on customers. But no matter what proportion of it is, it is staggering. This volume of information has changed how businesses operate in general – how products are developed, how businesses interact with their customers and most importantly, how marketing deals with this surge in not just data but Big Data.