Many of us are familiar with it - loyalty cards at supermarkets, electronics stores asking for your name just to buy AA batteries, ordering stuff online from who knows what, eBay transaction histories, there must be a virtual smorgasbord of marketing information on me and you that marketers would pay a pretty penny for.
Is it possible to get a glimpse of what companies think about my buying habits, or even just a sample of what an average American’s marketing profile looks like? I wonder if this information might fall under “Consumer Reporting Agency” laws like reports compiled by Credit Reporting Agencies as well as the Medical Information Bureau seem to do.
Is this stuff regularly shared? E.g. if I use a supermarket loyalty card and frequently purchase large quantities of chicken, might this fact eventually be sold and bought and sold and bought until it got to KFC, inspiring them to send me coupons?
Yes, it is shared. Collectively, they have an extremely good profile on you. Combine that with websites like Facebook it is practically Orwellian. No, you can’t see it yourself. The terms were spelled out in the user agreement when you signed up for the loyalty card or website. You wouldn’t know what to make of it anyway. You bought the stuff so you already know what the raw data is. Even it is inaccurate, the result would just be coupons for bulk tubs of KY Jelly or something. That isn’t considered an privacy intrusion with the consequences of something like credit reporting. Companies boil the data down the way they want to anyway.
It runs the whole spectrum. I used to work in IT for a supermarket that pioneered loyalty cards for New England in the mid 90’s. We didn’t know what to do with all the data we had. It was all sitting there in this massive database waiting to be used and that is still true to some extent. It is entertaining to look up your friends and neighbors for a few hours but it typically just ends up being used as a request for an analyst to figure out the best customers for a particular type of products and sending them a coupon for a new variation on it. I other words, the data is there for ad-hoc analysis however and whenever you want to do it.
The newest version of that is more scary and there are some recent articles on it but I will have to find them. Facebook, Amazon, and other sites have real-time sharing. That controls the ads you see when you use your computer. The overall goal is to only show you ads for things that you have shown you are actively interested in. You may have noticed that over time. If you start searching for houses online, yourads will switch over to ads to mortgage lenders and stores like Home Depot. Those are not random because they targeted you as a new home buyer. Start searching for boats or certain styles of clothes and that will trigger a new set of ads. You have no special right to know what they are doing with information because it is just a vastly enhanced version of traditional marketing.
So, basically what you are saying is that you can data mine raw transaction data? E.g. there might be records in the database indicating that I bought deodorant in such and such a quantity at such and such a time, and one can conclude what they will?
What about true profiles? Does anyone have an example on what conclusions some companies make based on sales data? Is there a such a thing as “John Vernon (of Springfield, CA)'s marketing profile which says ‘30yo man, interests include SF literature, cats, Caribbean travel, the Civil War, and horse racing. Owns a home built in 1950. Drives a 2003 Honda Civic. Travels frequently for business. Frequent business destinations: NYC, Chicago, London, Montreal. Education: MA. Has 2 kids (girl age 10, boy age 6, spouse at record #545555’”, or is that more of a myth?
Both of those are true. Nobody cares about the raw data except snoopy people playing with technology but it is there to build the aggregate data. The stuff in your second paragraph exists as well in multiple forms. You can always go back and run new analyses on the raw data once it is stored to figure out whatever you want. You won’t be able to see it however unless you know someone in marketing for a company that buys such data. There is a large industry devoted to data warehousing such data for custom purposes and analysts build it for whatever is needed for special programs.
Again, you already know what is in it unless you are the victim of wide-scale identity theft. Data warehouses consolidate data so that they can tell if you bought plane tickets to foreign destinations in the last X years or anything else they want to know. Once the raw data is there in the database, you can run summaries and statistics on it however you want. The fur coat industry is in sharp decline for instance but some are still sold. It is easy to find people that have bought real fur coats in the last five years and send them promotions for another one if that is your goal. The type of cars you have purchases is easy to profile as well and hardly a secret because it is registered with the state among other places. Marketing companies don’t really care about you or what you bought at an individual level. The good ones look for correlated buying patterns and try to match promotions to consumers that fit those patterns.