Are companies spying on us ?
Feb 2nd, 2013 by annemazin
Knowing your consumers very well is one of the key of marketing. Then, you are able to identify their needs and you are able to predict their future purchases before they even realize they need them. A lot of companies, like Target, are really focused on the purchase behaviour of every customer identified and registered in the system. Having an efficient costumer service that tracks every purchase enables the company to understand what kind of items costumers buy.
This is how Target found out that a teenager was pregnant before her father did. How come? Target assigns every consumer an ID number linked to their credit card, name or email address and stores in the system their purchase history. This purchase history is then analyzed to predict any future buy.
For instance, if a woman starts buying supplements (like calcium, magnesium or zinc) or even, scent-free soap and big bags of cotton balls, she is considered as a potential pregnant woman. Then, they send her personalized booklets with coupons for pregnancy products. And to be sure to attract her attention towards pregnancy products, those coupons are mixed with rebates for items she won’t probably buy like lawn mowers. This is how a father from Minneapolis called the company because her daughter was receiving coupons for baby clothes.
In that case, the costumer service of Target is really efficient. So efficient that it becomes really intrusive. Is it an attack to people’s privacy? Absolutely. What does that mean? Our society based on lure of profit is now reduced to spy on its consumers to make more profits. Unfortunately, we don’t have much of a choice. We are the first ones to give information about ourselves to companies from our email/mail addresses to the number of our credit card(s).
source link = http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/