There's no doubt a massive amount of my personal information is floating around out there in the algorithmosphere. Some of which, I'm sure, I have no idea about. My concern, unlike some others, is not an Orwellian loss of privacy but whether or not the companies I do business with will ever be able to use this data in a way that will be of some value to me.
Too often — which in this context means just about 100 percent of the time — I'm provided recommendations or offers based on incomplete or incorrect knowledge. Some recent examples:
- A direct mailing from a local mass merchandiser with special offers on baby items. Yes, we do purchase baby wipes, but check your records and you'll see it's been years since we bought diapers. We never purchased infant formula (the resident RN is also a board certified lactation consultant). In other words, our use of wipes has nothing to do with a baby in the house.
- A music download service continues to email recommended selections in the Electronica genre despite my account (not the same thing as me) having placed only one such order in nearly 10 years. Evidence the site has to the contrary are large annual purchases of music in the Americana, blues, rock and soul genres.
- I check out at a local supermarket buying my favorite type of Greek yogurt and am handed a coupon for a competitive item. I don't want to switch. I've already tried the other stuff and I have nothing good to say about its taste. Give me a coupon for what I already buy.
The biggest issue I see with retailers' use of data, aside from not mining it insightfully, is that they don't have the complete picture. To know what I want and how I shop requires having access to information beyond a store's scan data or orders placed on a single website. There are certain food items, for example, that I only buy from a given store. Why? Because while other merchants may stock a particular company's products, they don't stock the SKU I want.
At the NRF Big Show in January, I spoke with a number of Big Data experts who all claimed that a solution was coming soon. Retailers would soon know what I was buying in other places. This, they all claimed, would be done without endangering my information's safety.
Nielsen Catalina Solutions, according to an Advertising Age report, is adding data from financial sources such as credit cards and banks to information it is already grabbing from scan data to provide a more complete picture of shopper behavior. I've also heard that others are doing something similar. Let's hope they get it right, for my shopping sake.