Blockchain's influence on digital marketing : An exploratory study examining blockchain in relation to big data and digital marketing

Today's society has grown to be highly digitalized where technologies are playing a large role in everyone's lives. Moreover, society is still developing at a rapid pace, with a new innovation around every corner and with more and more business conducted online. By using this as a starting point, the authors of this thesis choose to examine how blockchain can influence the use of big data in digital marketing. Moreover, as previous articles have perceived GDPR as an obstacle for implementing blockchain within this context, the authors perceived it as necessary to examine blockchains’ relation to GDPR. Thus, this thesis has set out to both identify challenges and opportunities that exist when applying blockchain within the context of digital marketing. This exploratory thesis applies a qualitative data collection method in order to fulfill the purpose of the study and to answer the following components of the research question; (1) How will blockchain influence the use of big data within digital marketing? (2) How will blockchain in a digital marketing context cope with the regulations of GDPR? (3) How will blockchain influence the future of digital marketing? The qualitative collection method chosen is semi-structured interviews and has included six participants from Europe. The findings of this thesis suggest that blockchain will influence big data and thus, digital marketing will be influenced because it is heavily data-driven. Furthermore, blockchain will influence the companies’ knowledge of the customer, allow more reliable data to be obtained, and allow consumers to retain ownership over their data. Thus, blockchain places a higher demand on companies to deliver relevant information and match the interest of customers in order for the companies to gain access to customers’ data. Additionally, the findings suggest that blockchain has the ability to remove intermediaries and eliminate fraudulent activities, such as deep fakes, illegitimate reviews, click-fraud, within digital marketing. Despite that blockchain has a lot of potentials, it also faces a lot of challenges and obstacles. For instance, large companies such as Google may feel threatened by the blockchain and thus, these companies may have incentives for disrupting the implementation of the technology. Moreover, practical challenges have been identified. These were related to non-scalable algorithms and limited capacities to store large amounts of data.