Small Data

Small Data is Lindstrom's seventh book and an argument against the assumption that scale is what makes consumer information useful. Its case is that businesses learn more about why people behave as they do by observing consumers directly in their own homes than by relying solely on big data. The book chronicles several years of consumer studies carried out for large corporations around the world, and is structured around case studies in which the author interviews people where they live, notices small and apparently trivial details of how they use products, and builds hypotheses from those details about what the behaviour is actually for. The small clue, rather than the large dataset, is treated as the thing that carries the explanation, because it preserves the context that aggregation strips away. The method is closer to ethnography than to survey research, and the pay-off claimed is practical, products and services designed from observed behaviour rather than from reported preference. The book reached the New York Times bestseller list and was named a best business book of 2016 by strategy and business, and one of Inc. magazine's best sales and marketing books.

Written from the encyclopaedia article on the book at Wikipedia, with the Internet Archive catalogue record for the date.

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• Martin Lindstrom