Optimera: Incessant Consumer Surveillance Is Leaking Into Physical Stores

måndag 24 oktober 2016

Incessant Consumer Surveillance Is Leaking Into Physical Stores

For the past five years or so, brick-and-mortar retail stores have been trying to catch up with their online counterparts in tracking and personalization. Joseph Turow, a professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania, has been studying the marketing and advertising industries for decades. He chronicled the most recent developments in retail surveillance for his forthcoming book, The Aisles Have Eyes, which will be released by Yale University Press in January.
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What’s interesting is that there are different apps that will interact with the store’s marketing dynamics that have nothing to do with the name of the store. There’s a company called InMarket which has its software in many, many different apps. So if you have, say, the Condé Nast app, it can wake up when you walk into the store and tell the store that you’re in, and what kinds of stuff to offer you, and stuff like that.
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The ability to run through thousands of datapoints about you and compare them with thousands of datapoints about people you don’t even know, and then come up with a sense of what you will buy or not buy at what price: That’s the goal. The goal is to come up with a price for you that you accept based on the product they think you would want.