Understanding the consumers mind

Have you ever counted the amount of hours you spend on the Internet? The efficiency of the Internet is incredible, the massive amount of information you can find within seconds still amazes me. I can Google the size of Michael Jordan’s hands and find out instantly, it is 12.25 inches from his palm to the tip of his middle finger, in case you were wondering. The internet can give you the answers to your finance midterm, that your professor was dumb enough to let you take home or connect you with your best friend from 3^rd grade that you lost touch with. Regardless how you use the Internet there are a lot of benefits, marketers roles in e-commerce has increased greatly with the advancement in technology.

Let’s use for example online shopping. Many companies use behavioral targeting to predict a consumer’s thought process during the time of purchase. With online technology that has advanced over the years marketers have been able to not only monitor what a consumer purchases but how they came about to this purchase. Online there is a record of your purchases, when you purchased it, the amount of time you spent on a page prior to clicking to see more information and other products you viewed before you decided on one. Marketers have been able to see all this information using cookies, they are small bits of information that your browser saves on your hard drive, this can be accessed later to determine a consumer’s behavior. On one hand behavioral targeting can be seen as good, this allows for companies like Apple through iTunes to give you a list of similar songs that were purchased by consumers that enjoy the same kind of music as you. This can expose you to new artists you may have never known of before, advertisements will be directed more towards your likes rather than filling your email inbox with offers for Bosley’s male hair transplant, when you’re a 22 year old female with a full head of hair.

On the other hand, behavioral targeting can be seen as an invasion of privacy. In my personal opinion, how can this be an invasion of privacy? Our generation, the social media generation, has grown up with LiveJournals, MySpace’s, Facebook’s and Twitters in which we can share where we are, what we are buying and whom we are with. This is prime information for marketers; by being socially connected marketers engaging in behavioral targeting can learn via social media and our web browsers, our interests. Behavioral targeting will have big effects on the web in the future and our personal experience on it; just because I browsed through an article on finance within CNN.com doesn’t necessarily mean I am ready to engage in stock trading (I barely passed finance, I don’t want to go back down that road). In the past I might have been pigeonholed into that category, but behavioral targeters are testing out various demographics and creating algorithms that will determine a consumer’s depth and various interest. This will evidentially give them a broad spectrum of choices.

Don’t feel that you are losing a bit of your privacy; view it as the Internet is being molded to your interests. Behavioral targeting has immense potential on changing the way we search for information.

- Amanda C