Using technology to better understand consumers’ wants and needs has hit a new stride as brands compete to target promotions and deliver personalized customer service.
While most major retailers have used predictive analytics for years, new technologies have augmented the statistical game to nuances heretofore unknown. For instance, IBM has begun testing technology that essentially assigns core psychological traits by analyzing a consumer’s tweets.
“We need to go below behavioral analysis like Amazon does,” said Michelle Zhou, lead of the User Systems and Experience Research Group at IBM’s Almaden Research Center where the software was created, according to Mashable. “We want to use social media to derive information about an individual—what is the overall affect of this person? How resilient is this person emotionally? People with different personalities want something different.”
The software builds a personality profile based on the most recent hundred or thousand Twitter updates, scoring them against the “big five” traits used in psychology: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. It also scores on “values” (hedonism and conservatism) and “needs” (curiosity and social harmony).[more]
Zhou says they are trialing the product with IBM customers to test if messages targeted with the technology work better than those without. “Our hypothesis is that the conversion rates will be quite high,” Zhou said. “Studies show people that are extroverted want a reward and recognition, like 10,000 [frequent flyer] points. Conscientious people want efficiency, to know their new flight right away.”
On the other hand, Google, a devotee of experimental and wearable tech, is taking to electronic ink to create skin tattoos that connect to a mobile device and function as a lie detector. “The intent of the device is to allow someone to wear a communications device on their throat, keeping a mobile phone or similar device in their pocket. The tattoo communicates with the device, transmitting conversation. Such a device might make things easier for someone who wants to transmit a conversation but cannot use their hands.”
Examples include security personnel, those working undercover and anyone in a sports or concert stadium where noise levels are high. As for lie detection, the electronic skin tattoo paired with a galvanic skin response detector can gauge if a user is confidently telling the truth—or not.
Collecting information on customers is far from new, but nevertheless controversial. “For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly walks into one of its stores,” the New York Times noted last year. Perhaps most famously was the case of the retailer exposing a teen girl’s pregnancy to her family by sending her coupons and ads featuring baby products—all thanks to a formula plugged into Target’s database that tracks product purchases and infers information. “Whenever possible, Target assigns each shopper a unique code — known internally as the Guest ID number — that keeps tabs on everything they buy.”
Other retailers like Nordstrom haven’t been so successful. The upscale department store caught backlash earlier this year after it began tracking consumers through their smartphones to collect data on time spent in certain store departments. The retailer eventually killed the project, which was being tested in a small crop of stores. But the use of such data goes beyond retail. As the Daily Beast noted in 2010, credit companies like MasterCard and Visa can predict how likely you are to get a divorce just by the data they’ve collected on their cardholders.