Understandably with the business landscape becoming more and more competitive companies are turning to unique –and in some ways morally questionable- methods to gain that competitive advantage over the rest of and industry. Take the North American retail giant Target as an example. In the early 2000’s Target unveiled a comprehensive “Guest ID” program that comprised all of a shoppers relevant user data under a single Guest ID, this information included the competition Target faced in the customers geographical area, the type of items they purchased, how they purchased them, etc. Target then used this data to predict what the consumer would purchase in the future and then send user specific coupons and flyers based off of that analysis.
Soon this Guest ID program was so effective that Target wanted to know even more about what consumers where going to purchase before they wanted to purchase it. Specifically they targeted expecting mothers, a group that statistically spent the most per visit at target. In order to achieve this Target created a ‘pregnancy index’ that analyzed consumer-buying habits in order to determine if an individual consumer was an expecting. Eventually, Target’s analysis got so specific that Target, to the surprise of a very concerned father, had predicted a woman’s pregnancy before she even knew she was pregnant [1].
It is this unruly obsession with data that raises some questions about the morality of major companies tracking customer data. To some extent these programs are an unfair infringement on consumers who just want to complete a shopping list and do not want to be apart of some corporate analysis that looks to exploit their wants in order to boost sales and consumer retention. However, these monitoring programs to provide some marginal benefits to the consumers that they monitor, In the case of Target, the Guest ID program provided consumers with coupons they would actually use decreasing consumer search time for a good at a lower price. As with most business ethics issues there it is not a matter of right or wrong but a matter of degree and we as consumers have to, on a case-by-case basis, evaluate how much we want participate in these consumer analysis programs.