The New Inquiry: Predictive analytics and information camouflage

thenewinquiry:

By Rob Horning

…Duhigg’s article focuses mainly on Target’s efforts to figure out which customers are about to go through a major life change (like pregnancy) so that it can take advantage of their flux and vulnerability to change their shopping habits.

“Consumers going through major life events often don’t notice, or care, that their shopping habits have shifted, but retailers notice, and they care quite a bit. At those unique moments, Andreasen wrote, customers are “vulnerable to intervention by marketers.” In other words, a precisely timed advertisement, sent to a recent divorcee or new homebuyer, can change someone’s shopping patterns for years.”

Apparently humans’ habits are hard to alter unless they are thrown into a kind of emotional state of shock by impending situations. For the time being, companies like Target are content to sift through our data trails to figure out who among us are entering into chaotic periods (and the process for this involves all sorts of cross-referencing of data from pools most of haven’t ever thought it was possible to combine — the focus of Turow’s book). Perhaps the technology to instigate such chaos in people’s lives on an individual by individual basis is waiting in the wings.

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