As I stated, data driven marketing is something that appeals to me. I look around and think about how valuable it would be to quantify all the movements and characteristics or every consumer. As the suggested reading from the NY Times highlighted, your smartphone is already being used to generate data not just about your web browsing tendencies, but also your whereabouts. Tie this data into social networking to understand your fiends' habits and locations, link this to previous credit card purchases, and roll in traditional demographic generalizations, and you pretty much have the ability to target every individual with advertising catered exactly to what they need and want. To do any better, you'd need to stalk them -- and that's illegal and time consuming.
I also saw the Kimberly-Clark presentation on their VR tool. I think this is a great step in the right direction to gather data and, more importantly, to help in sales pitches, but I can't help to think there are some flaws in the design. First, I know that my shopping experience is greatly altered by the amount of traffic in the store. Yes, I know they are targeting women, which I am not, but I find it hard to believe that a mom pushing around a screaming toddler in a busy store will linger and browse just the same as they would in another situation (though I have seen this done). Second, given what I see in a number of stores, people may pick up a product on impulse and even put this in their carts, but there are a number of folks who then see another item they like better or have second thoughts, and they put the item down in some other location. I'm not sure the KC VR accurately captures this behavior. Finally, what about the stuck wheel on the cart? The shopper would get distracted, curse at the cart, and miss the cleverly placed displays. Other than those shortcomings, it's an interesting tool.
Finally, regarding the history of the internet, I had seen most of this already, but viewing it again in the context of marketing and web analytics was useful.
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You are right about the artificial context of the virtual shopping environment. I think that KC developed something "cute" but not really very useful.
ReplyDeleteMarketers have developed some interesting, unobtrusive applications for monitoring shoppers while actually shopping. Professor Ray Burke at the Kelley School is an expert in this area. Here is a link to one of his articles: http://www.kelley.iu.edu/CERR/files/shoppability.pdf. See page 13 for a discussion of observational approaches.
F.