Too Much of a Good Thing? How Big Data Changes Managerial Decision Making in Marketing

The digitalization of business processes generates massive amounts of available data sources. Having triggered great enthusiasm, without doubt, these developments are of particular impact. Whereas organizations aim to generate actionable customer insights from Big Data, researchers want to understand human decision processes and develop increasingly sophisticated models. Surprisingly, potential negative consequences of Big Data are widely unexplored. Addressing this research gap, the results from a controlled experiment with executives show that Big Data tends to lead managers to blindly trust respective recommendations for action. In a product and innovation management set-ting, managers were found to accept managerial outcomes derived by Big Data com-pared to market research or personal experience and also to contribute less their own ideas. Interestingly, this relationship seems to be particularly evident for top managers resulting in important implications for research and practice.