“In the future everyone will be anonymous for 15 minutes” – Banksy
The graffiti artist, Banksy, may not have been far from the truth when he displayed this quote at his Barely Legal Art show years ago. As technology improves almost daily and with the advent of ubiquitous access to social media, privacy and anonymity are not what they used to be. Some people love making every little detail of their life public – updating their friends and followers on everything from what they ate for breakfast to the fact that they got a paper cut at work. On the other hand, some people try to keep their lives private in this new age of social media by restricting as much personal information as possible in the privacy settings of their social networking websites. However, it’s becoming more and more apparent that no one is, or can be, truly invisible these days.
One area where we are constantly watched is in the consumer world – companies continuously track our purchases and consumer preferences in an effort to focus their marketing to us. Facebook and Google Ads are a prime example of this practice. They look at the information in your profile or emails and then display ads on the side, which relate to this information. When I take a moment to stop and think about this, it really feels like an invasion of privacy – I think I’m writing a personal email to a friend, but in actuality Google is also “reading” my email and using it to try to get me to enroll in an online nursing school since I mentioned graduate school in my email. Creepy.
Amazon is another company that tracks the items its customers view and what items they purchase in an effort to promote sales. Amazon uses the information they collect about items you purchase or even look at to make recommendations to you about products you might enjoy and products people commonly buy together. This is a successful marketing technique, because often times consumers are presented additional or complementary products while they have a need for these products, a marketing strategy called “moment. By basing their recommendations on the customer’s previous purchase or viewing habits, Amazon is ensuring that they are showing products that the customer should identify with. Psychology has shown that people are very egocentric and are more apt to like and therefore purchase something when they feel it relates to them personally. Additionally, while customer’s may initially go to Amazon with the intent to purchase something specific, Amazon is hoping that the recommendations shown will entice them to make an impulse buy as well. The key to impulse buys is visibility – by making a product visible, it will hopefully trigger a reaction that causes the person to realize they actually do need that product either now or in the future. Visibility also increases familiarity, which can increase a consumer’s liking towards that product.
From our personal correspondences to our online purchases and even our supermarket purchases (yes, every time you use that supermarket rewards card, companies are tracking what you purchase), we as consumers are constantly being watched. The information that is collected about us is then hurled back at us in an effort to get us to consume even more. This information is useful for market research and helps marketers target consumer groups more successfully, but I wonder at what point does this constant advertising and marketing lose its effectiveness as consumers become inundated with information and begin to tune out these campaigns. As consumers, is there anyway to regain our invisibility or is anonymity a thing of the past as Banksy predicted?
Where Marketing and Psychology Meet 