The Persuaders by James Garvey

Author:James Garvey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd

7

Left to Our Devices

‘We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.’

CARL SAGAN

The girl’s father could see no reason to be stoic about it. He appeared at his local Target, a department store somewhere on the outskirts of Minneapolis, and confronted the store’s manager in person. ‘My daughter got this in the mail!’ he shouted. ‘She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?’ The manager didn’t know anything about it, but he apologised on behalf of the store. Maybe it was some sort of computer glitch, but in any case it wouldn’t happen again. The manager called some days later, to follow up and apologise for a second time, but the father was now contrite. ‘I had a talk with my daughter’, he said. ‘It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August.’1

The coupons were no coincidence, and there certainly was no computer glitch. Target knew about the girl’s pregnancy before her father did. Like most large retail chains, Target has been storing and analysing data about its customers for many years, perhaps decades. Target assigns each shopper a ‘Guest ID Number’ and uses this to track every purchase, and ties this information to other facts about us. It’s hard to be sure, as stores are understandably unwilling to admit to much, but major stores track such things as credit card details, a customer’s marital status, whether or not a shopper has children, email addresses, the point of sale, and the time of day purchases are made. All of this can be coupled with much more finely-grained and personal information – political interests, credit ratings, past bankruptcies or legal troubles, education history, charitable donations, and now much more nuanced information gleaned from our social media profiles, search histories and other virtual interactions – all of it purchased from suppliers in the business of acquiring and selling data. It’s not known for sure how much shops like Target know about us. What’s clear is that it’s in their interest to know as much as they can.

This is because Target also knows an important fact about our general behaviour as consumers. Once we settle into buying habits, we tend to keep them. If the toothpaste is acceptable, given that we’re creatures who stick with defaults, we’re likely to use it for as long as we’ve got teeth. But marketing teams know there are fabled moments of flexibility in a human life, instances in which purchasing decisions become gloriously unmoored from the habits of a lifetime, and new customers can be won over. Buying a house, starting a degree, marriage, divorce, losing a job and the death of a family member all offer the salesperson superb moments of intervention, a chance to sell new products and ingrain new kinds of habits. But the possibilities associated with the birth of a first child are very nearly endless.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.