Fusing Aggregate and Disaggregate Data with an Application to Multiplatform Media Consumption

As firms collect greater amounts of data about their customers from an ever broader set of "touchpoints," a new set of methodological challenges arises. Companies often collect data from these various platforms at differing levels of aggregation, and it is not clear how to merge these data sources to draw meaningful inferences about customer-level behavior patterns. In this article, the authors provide a method that firms can use, based on readily available data, to gauge and monitor multiplatform media usage. The key innovation in the method is a Bayesian data-fusion approach that enables researchers to combine individual-level usage data (readily available for most digital platforms) with aggregated data on usage over time (typically available for traditional platforms). This method enables the authors to disentangle the intraday correlations between platforms (i.e., the usage of one platform vs. another on a given day) from longer-term correlations across users (i.e., heavy/light usage of multiple platforms over time). The authors conclude with a discussion of how this method can be used in a variety of marketing contexts for which data have become readily available, such as gauging the interplay between online and brick-and-mortar purchasing behavior.