162 14.9 Consumer Data from Private-Sector Sources
162 14.9 Consumer Data from Private-Sector Sources
In addition to the syndicated research services, individual businesses are gathering a breath-taking amount of information about their own, and sometimes their competitors’, customers. Private-sector businesses have become major players in gathering and mining data about their customers. If you are reporting about a business or a trend or if you are doing strategic communications for one of these organizations, you will almost certainly want to ask about their customer data practices.
Here is one example: a major discount retailer used information willingly provided by customers from its “Baby Registry” and sales information from its customer loyalty programs (you sign up for special deals and notices in exchange for allowing the company to monitor your purchases) to identify a “profile” of female customers who were in their second trimester of pregnancy. When the retailer’s research staff crawled through millions of customer records, it became clear there there were about 25 products that, when purchased together, allowed them to assign shoppers a “pregnancy prediction” score.
Let’s say there is a 23-year-old shopper who bought, in March, a large jar of cocoa-butter lotion, a purse roomy enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. According to the retailer’s interpretation of those data, there is an 87 percent change that shopper was pregnant with a delivery date in late August. Based on that information, the retailer could then send a coupon for related products and services or target advertising messages to her based on her “pregnancy score.” If you were doing advertising for this retailer, you can imagine how valuable this information could be. You can also imagine how disturbed many of the retailer’s customers would be to know they are being so profiled.
Such “profiling” is being done by companies based on every single thing we do in our virtual and “real” lives. Communications professionals are among those who are using such data to better reach us with information when, when and how we want it.
Here is another description of this “social profiling” from an article by Joseph Turow that appeared in The Atlantic magazine
Consider a fictional middle class family of two parents with three children who eat out a lot in fast-food restaurants. After a while the parents receive a continual flow of fast-food restaurant coupons. Data suggest the parents, let’s call them Larry and Rhonda, will consistently spend far more than the coupons’ value. Additional statistical evaluations of parents’ activities and discussions online and off may suggest that Larry and Rhonda and their children tend toward being overweight. The data, in turn, results in a small torrent of messages by marketers and publishers seeking to exploit these weight issues to increase attention or sales. Videos about dealing with overweight children, produced by a new type of company called con