(1) Company xyz is having problems generating reports that pull from an sql database. They take too long, IT says it's because the data is too large and their hardware is old. Obviously this is big data! Wrong, re-writing the sql queries and indexing some fields solved the problem. Like, beginner-level stuff. Nobody had even looked at the code or structure of the database when initially trying to solve the problem.
or
(2) Company xyz can't load a dataset into memory to perform some computations on it, it's too large. Needs better hardware or big data solution obviously. With millions of rows and many columns, ok. Only 6 of those columns were even used by the processing job, and a fraction of the rows were relevant. There was no need to fit the entire dataset into memory in the first place, problem solved.
I could go on. Lots of companies just lack the skills and knowledge to do things right, and have no idea what's going on under the hood or how things work. So naturally, they are drawn to the marketing buzz surrounding big data, cloud computing, data warehousing, machine learning, etc etc etc.