-Caveat Lector-
Spending the past weekend in NY I checked out the largest weekly paper
"Village Voice" and the 12/5/98 issue has a decent write up re
"dataveillance," "relationship marketing" and how this lingo is taking
us (yippie!!) into the 21st Century.
Granted, while the media has covered these issues to a certain degree,
the VV piece does cover some interesting issues (some of which ya'll may
have already read about). "Convenience" with new technology is their
way into our lives. "Incentive" and "subterfuge" are key words, folks.
Here's a few excerpts (URL for entire piece is listed below):
"............But our consumer culture is far
too advanced
to sustain itself on the crude meshing of
supply and demand. In a market bursting with
goods, consumers must be routinely
surveilled
in order to minimize the risks of selling.
The
invisible hand requires an invisible eye. So
it's
no surprise that the surveillance society
finds
its purest expression in the collection of
consumer data.
Sociologists call this corporate tracking
"dataveillance." It involves more than
merely
knowing your age, race, and religion; your
profession, credit rating, and medical
history�
though all this information is readily
available.
When you surf the Net, buy through the mail,
take a vacation, or actualize yourself with
a
credit card, you leave a data trail as
revealing
as an animal's spoor. The pattern that
emerges as these traces accumulate reveals
a personality composed of tastes in
everything
from antacid to sexual partners. And this
information is a valuable commodity. Direct
marketing campaigns accounted for about
$750 billion in sales this year, and the key
to
this bonanza is personal data............."
"..................As a result, firms like
Donnelly
Marketing, which keeps dossiers on over 90
percent of American households, are able to
operate beneath the radar of public opinion
and beyond the scope of the law. Donnelly's
clients use its massive files to discover
each
family's preferences in everything from pets
to
politics.
----------------->Data profiteers are aware of the general
anxiety about snooping, and they've
developed
a game plan, equal parts incentive and
subterfuge. For example, toll-free 800
numbers
double as caller-ID systems, and whenever
you use one of these consumer conveniences,
your number may end up in a corporate
database. The mother of all dataveillance
gimmicks� the magazine sweepstakes� has
evolved into Pavlovian giveaways like the
PepsiCo program, which offered beepers to
teenagers last year. The company paged
250,000 kids with ads and a message from
Mountain Dew to call corporate headquarters.
The winners got prizes, and the company
gained entr�e to the next PepsiCo
generation.............."
".................The ultimate use of all
this info is a new
corporate strategy called "relationship
marketing," in which companies seek to bond
with customers for life through an
increasingly
differentiated array of transactions.
Frequent-flier programs, leases that offer
product updates, and dedicated customer reps
are all designed to gather information
companies can use to insure customer
loyalty. Soon bookstores, supermarkets, and
retailers will adopt this model of
monitoring
and reward. But the bonding doesn't end
there.
In addition to paying a small premium for
your
patronage, the company offers new goods and
services, creating a simulacrum of a real
relationship that deepens over
time........................."
"....................Demographics� the
old standard of selling to the masses� is
being replaced by a more precise schematic,
in which people are classified according to
their personality profiles. On Madison
Avenue,
this strategy is called "psychographics."
-----------------> "..........Such a high degree of segmentation depends
on surveillance, and companies are enlisting
the full range of technology to accomplish
this
crucial task. The corporate version of those
electronic collars used in home detention is
in
development at The PreTesting Company of
New Jersey. It's a watch that records
messages encoded in the sound tracks of
radio and TV commercials. The future Neilsen
families who wear this timepiece will give
marketers unheard-of accuracy about who
tunes in to what. The same device will also
detect signals from a chip inserted into the
spines of magazines, conveying how long a
reader spends perusing a
publication.............."
------------->snip>----------------
http://www.villagevoice.com/features/9850/boal.shtml
Regards,
-A
http://www.erols.com/mack97
"The sharpest tool in the shed." -- anonymous
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