Walmart was really the George Washington, Napoleon - or Stalin - of this movement (depending on your view of the process and its outcome). Everyday low prices may have been their catch-phrase, but that promise could only be achieved by capturing the purchase data, identifying the significant trends and then acting on them in concert with their suppliers.
As in so many other realms of what was once private but is increasingly public life, these decisions inform trends, create the opportunity for anticipation - and can lead in wildly disparate directions if one person's idiosyncratic inclinations is inflated beyond its real meaning.
Are you a Democrat who reads business magazines? A Republican who buys condoms? A liberal who drinks discount beer? A conservative who drinks organic wine? You are messing with history!
As the following article explains, people whose purchase behavior is not necessarily consistent with what marketing algorythms have led their creators to believe are - or, more to the point - should be their 'obvious' political inclinations.
Which may have actually established an opportunity for fun in an election so mean-spirited that it appears utterly devoid of it. Want to confuse the pollsters? Wish to throw all those earnest projections about swing states and independent voters into disarray? Hoping to have a laugh election night as analysts intensely attempt to interpret data that runs counter to all of their high tech wizardry?
You can do it. Buy brands that satisfy your family's basic needs but play havoc with the computer models designed to derive meaning from every swipe of your credit card. Be creative. And since it's almost Halloween, get into the spirit and disguise your purchase identity for a week. Shop at different stores. Buy different products. Sign up for previously ignored promotions. You, personally, could throw southern Alabama or western Massachusetts - or wherever you live - into contention. Despite the fact that the experts have already sonorously intoned on your destiny.
The tone of this post has been jocular, but the intent is serious. Our purchase histories increasingly determine our destiny for marketers, educators, pollsters and all the other symbolic analysts whose job it is to make sense from consumer information. As a society, we may be unintentionally shaping and limiting our choices without realizing it. JL
Rory O'Connor comments in AlterNet:
Attention American citizens! Have you visited a porn website recently? Do you have any gay friends? Is your home in foreclosure? Do you drink Michelob or Samuel Adams? None of my business, you say? Probably not – but Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have made it their business to know these and other intimate details of your personal life. Moreover, they may have already shared them with a host of your friends and colleagues, who in turn may have shared them with their friends and colleagues. What’s worse, you may be getting a phone call soon from one of them, armed with these and other facts about you, and intent at “shaming” you on Facebook and other social media sites for not voting in the past and to persuade you, through an adroit mix of social encouragement and opprobrium, into going to the ballot box next month.
Sadly but predictably, the very same data-mining techniques now being employed by large corporations to pry into your privacy have emerged as powerful weapons on both sides of the battle for the American presidency. As the New York Times recently reported , “consultants to both campaigns said they had bought demographic data from companies that study details like voters’ shopping histories, gambling tendencies, interest in get-rich-quick schemes, dating preferences and financial problems.”
Of course, officials with both campaigns are admittedly doing their best to keep their sleazy practices secret and off the record. “You don’t want your analytical efforts to be obvious because voters get creeped out,” one unnamed Romney campaign official confessed to a Times reporter. “A lot of what we’re doing is behind the scenes.”
On the record, spokesmen for both sides naturally pledge allegiance to voters’ privacy, claiming they are committed to protecting it and that they are both “adhering to industry best practices on privacy and going above and beyond what’s required by law”, as Adam Fetcher, an Obama campaign spokesman, put it, and “ensuring that all of our voter outreach is governed by the highest ethical standards”, as Ryan Williams, a spokesman for the Romney campaign, said.
How high are their standards? Not very – consultants to both campaigns admit to buying targeted demographic data from companies that creepily study our habits, preferences and problems. Both campaigns have planted software on voters’ computers, for example, to see what websites they frequent – “evangelical or erotic”. And both have experimented with the idea of embarrassing non-voters “by sending letters to their neighbors or posting their voting histories online”. One Democratic consultant wondered aloud if this is the year to start shaming. “Obama can’t do it,” he noted. “But the ‘super PACs are anonymous. They don’t have to put anything on the flier to let the voter know who to blame.”
How bad is this hidden data-dumpster diving? Both the Democratic and Republican National Committees have already spent millions on data acquisition – often paid to companies that are undergoing scrutiny from Congress over privacy concerns or have been sued over alleged privacy or consumer protection violations.
With social media a key determinant in persuading supporters to actually turn out to vote, the new techniques of data-mining and social shaming could play a decisive factor in this year’s election. Both campaigns have been asking supporters to provide access to their profiles on Facebook and other social networks, so they can determine their connections to other potential voters in key “battleground states”.
Clearly the Obama camp, with a long head start in the social media arena and a heavy 2012 emphasis on digital campaigning, is leading on this front. But as the Timesnoted, both Obama and Romney campaign officials “increasingly sound like executives from retailers like Target and credit card companies like Capital One, both of which extensively use data to model customers’ habits”.
Rich Beeson, Romney’s political director, explained it best. “Target anticipates your habits, which direction you automatically turn when you walk through the doors, what you automatically put in your shopping cart,” he said. “We’re doing the same thing with how people vote.”
For the record, then, I drink Samuel Adams beer, never eat at Red Lobster or Olive Garden, don’t shop much (and certainly not at the Burlington Coat Factory,) and both smooth jazz and college football leave me cold. Does that make me an Obama or Romney supporter?
I’m not telling… after all, I cherish my privacy!
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