Now let’s take a moment to consider all of the ways in which marketers and advertisers are able to access information about the individual consumer’s spending habits and personal shopping needs. Google is a marketer/advertiser gold mine. Spend a few minutes surfing your favorite Internet sites and they know a lot more about you than you probably would like for them to know.
Target, who has been credited with being able to find out if a customer is pregnant, even if she doesn’t want them to know, has been collecting vast amounts of data on every person who walks into its stores for decades. Each Target shopper is assigned a unique Guest ID number that not only keeps tabs on everything you buy but is also linked to demographic information such as your age, marital status, number of kids you have, which part of town you live in, your estimated household income, how long it takes you to drive to the store, whether you’ve recently moved, what websites you visit, and what credit cards you carry in your wallet.
Acxiom, the leader in the multi-billion dollar database marketing industry, was featured in a June 2012 New York Times article by Natasha Singer and was said to have databases containing “information on about 500 million active consumers worldwide, with about 1,500 data points per person…and knows things like your age, race, sex, weight, height, marital status, education level, politics, buying habits, household health worries, vacation dreams – and on and on.”
Wait a minute – did they say “multi-billion dollar database marketing industry?” When I first read it, I just kind of read on by, and then about a paragraph later, did a double take. Database marketing Industry – in the words of my three-year old daughter – “What does that even mean?” It means, folks, that there is a whole industry dedicated to gathering as much information about you and your behaviors as possible and selling it to others who then use it as a tool to try to manipulate what, where, and how you consume goods and services. Now I promise I’m not going to go all 1984 on you. I’m not a conspiracy theorist. All I am saying is, if you ask me, that is kind of creepy.
So, what is the purpose of all of this marketing anyway? In layman’s terms, marketing is an effort to get consumers to behave, i.e. spend their money, their time, and/or their energy, in ways the marketer would like for them to behave. Retailers want you to spend your money, time and energy consuming their products and services. The Humane Society wants you to spend your money, time and energy supporting their philanthropic efforts. Politicians want you to spend your time and energy voting for them. Anti-drug campaigns want you spend your time and energy not doing something – “just say no.” Even awareness campaigns and health campaigns want you to spend, or refrain from spending, your money, time and energy in a particular way. They all want you to do something, to behave a specific way.
Successful marketers know that one of the most effective ways to get customers to spend money, time and energy consuming their products and services is to convince the customers that they need a particular product or service. Most often they accomplish that by either creating a need where one did not exist before, or by turning a want into a need. That is to say, by changing our perceptions.
MEANINGFUL CONSUMERISM 