This is a piece of interesting news that I picked from the NYTimes: a company in the US, called Sense Networks (in NY), has launch an analytics program that will help analyze data on people's movements, routines, and trips - and potentially encounters with other people (or crowds), ads, and the retail shop. This comes after NATURE published a study on how people of an unnamed city roam around their city/locale using cell-phone signals.
From a research perspective, this is a lot of data - a treasure trove of data.
From a marketeer's POV, this is a something like a dream come true: knowing where your consumers are, what kinds of media/communications they encounter with on the street, how they behave alone versus in groups versus in crowds of people, and how they behave inside the store en route to buying your product. A savvy marketeer can immediately see the value (I hope) of such information - and how it can be deployed to improve one's investments across different kinds of media and non-media channels.
I can imagine, for example, a marketeer or a media planning company in NY tagging all their outdoor sites, bus-/train-ads with GPS data - alongside shopping centers that carry their brands or their competitors.
I can also imagine marketeers and data-miners having a grand time consolidating information in-store with those gathered from these troves of consumer- and ad-/media-locator data - and creating predictive models and algorithms that would make brand campaigns more effective.
I can also imagine how these sort of data will move adspends away from TV and potentially other in-home media, including the internet because "the last golden mile" in retail marketing is still the most important part of the buying process...!
But I am also pretty sure that this will attract a lot of controversy: privacy and individual anonymity.
It's going to be - hmm - intrusive. It could very well be the start of conspiracy theorists' and privacy advocates' nightmare: Big Brother On The Loose. I can't imagine what would stop governments using this kind of technology (if they don't already have it - now that sounds a little like a conspiracy theory...) to track down individuals of interest to the state/nation in order to "protect" and ensure the safety of the public.
So - given these imagined possibilities, what should we think of these developments?
Well, I think we need to carefully think through this one very carefully. Whilst it is great technology - and it could benefit marketeers (and, marketeers would argue, it could also benefit consumers), I think that it furthers the questions on privacy, ethics in marketing research, and corporate social responsibility:
- While individual-level data is good for business (think CRM, think CLV analysis, think RFM, think HB Regression and Clustering), how "individual" should individual-level data be? How much is enough? And how much is too much?
- How do we ensure that the guidelines set by and through marketing research societies all over the world about consumer privacy and about ensuring respondent-anonymity are followed to the letter? The commercial reasons sometimes may well override these guidelines - and who doesn't want to earn some money?
- What kinds of information are off-limits and what are not? People going to and from a grocery store after having gone through the train, for example, would be pretty good data for media planners and outdoor specialists. Marrying those tidbits of information with purchase data would provide very good information of how people buy things. But where would data-gathering stop?
However, there are also repercussions that come with the availability of these kinds of data.
Tags: Data, Analytics, Research, Marketing Research, Media Planning
