Online targeted consumers

How many of you are in favour of Internet shopping? I definitely have my hand raised! It’s easy, time consuming and you don’t need to be dressed up for it. However, although if owning a credit card it is convenient to shop over the net, have you ever thought about who has access to your personal information?

Quoting from a journal on Online privacy, today digital technology makes it possible for personal information as public as a consumer’s name and address or as private as social security or credit card identification number to be gathered and shared around the world in the blink of an eye. I’m going to be using Amazon as my prime example in this week’s blog, as I can personally relate to it. So the main items I ever buy off Amazon are books and DVD’s. There will be odd occasions where I may look at other categories, like video games or iPod accessories. Amazon, as a seller, uses my personal information to send me emails on recommendations and promotions on DVDs and books every week. To make this even creepier, the emails on book recommendations are all related to my university course, which is Advertising and Marketing. An article on consumer’s privacy (Why should consumers surrender privacy?) quotes, one of the reasons Amazon.com is so successful is that it makes great use of online behavioural data by offering customers product recommendations based on what they—and others who viewed the same item—have purchased. The site creates a shopping experience tailored to the individual, which is invaluable.

By targeting every consumer to such a personal level, they create a relationship with the consumer, as the site knows exactly what they are interested in. This gradually forms a trusted relationship, which is what makes the consumer return to the Amazon website. It makes you feel as if they are one of your close friends that know you too well.

Having said that, has advertising become easier, in the sense that it is more precisely targeting consumers? Nowadays, brands that have Internet shopping can track most of the consumer’s personal details and use it in advantage to their research purposes. I’m sure you have noticed how when you sign up for something there are certain details that are marked with star signs and MUST be filled in. It’s like marketers don’t even need to go out and do research anymore; everything is just brought to them through the Internet. That’s the magic of online shopping, to the benefit of the companies.

Is the consumer his own product?

So here’s a little story. After a long day of working you are looking forward to going home and playing your xbox console, in order to relax and escape from your busy life. You enter your home and the controllers are nowhere to be found. You are going crazy. Where on earth had you put the controllers and now it is impossible to play without these magic objects that control your TV? But hold on, you are an xbox360 kinetics owner. You don’t need any controllers; you ARE the controller!

Ever since video games were invented, it has been inevitable to ignore their popularity and fast innovation. The first home video game console was released in 1972, so just under 40 years technology moved from simple-controller based consoles to no-controller-needed-at-all consoles! Pretty impressive if you ask me. However, the point I will make today follows, is technology innovating towards making the consumer his own product?

I’m sure all of you have by now heard the new xbox360 kinetics, where the consumer is the controller of the console. No additional accessories are needed, just the box and yourself. The xbox is able to recognise the player by natural user interface using gestures and spoken commands. Take a look at the link below.

What is kinect?

By making the audience the controller of the game, they are involving them within the digital technology by adding a literal meaning into interactivity. Quoting from an abstract from ‘Design Driven Innovation’, game consoles were considered entertainment gadgets for children who ere great at moving their thumbs; they offered a passive immersion in a visual world. Moving from that, what game consoles have aimed to do is to make the consumer more active towards the product, inserting an element of physical entertainment. Game console companies took a shot on radical innovation with the ‘disappearance’ of controllers and getting the consumer involved.

Although a great majority of consumers find this fascinating, I think it is working towards making the consumer lazier and less sociable. For example, the kinect home exercise.. Is it really worth running on the spot, pretending to exercise when you can go run outside and possibly socialise with friends while doing it? The consumer becomes drawn to the product because of the endless choices of interactive tasks included. If you like animals don’t pretend to stroke and play with an interactive one; go buy a pet!

Of course there are plus points to the innovative technology, such as it kills boredom to a greater extent than normal consoles do and it is more physically interactive in cases of bad weather. And even though it is aiming to make the consumer more active, I believe it is making the consumer more passive, in the sense that it is subconsciously pulling them into believing that they are part of the technology themselves.

Google AdWords

With the huge success that Google has been facing over the past few years, it is logical for companies to want to get involved with the most popular search engine. For those who are unfamiliar with what Google AdWords does, here’s a quick explanation. Google AdWords enables organizations to place their adverts on the right hand side of the Google search page, so that when an audience member types into the search bar specific words that are relevant to the organization’s purposes, their website link comes on the side. Through this, Google have managed to reach an advertising revenue of $28.2 billion in the year of 2010.

From a personal view, Google AdWords is a great way of companies to put themselves out there and into the digital world. Google has been facing a tremendous rise in popularity and usage by Internet users and is by far the most popular search engine. It has even prompted the English speaking population to come up with the phrase “Google it”, meaning ‘search it’. Additionally, Mintel's research shows that Internet users pay nearly twice as much attention to ads via search engines such as Google compared to social networks. Apart from the new preference of online media due to popularity, the recession and economic factors are another reason why companies choose to advertise online. Businesses look at a way that will reach their target market quickly and effectively. The following graph presents figures on the total online advertising between the years of 2001 and 2009.

 After familiarising myself with the purpose of Google AdWords, I had a little browse on Google search to see what would come up on the side. At first I typed in the word ‘cars’ and links to car websites, such as Volvo, Nissan and Mitsubishi came up. Subsequently, I typed in ‘bags’ and links to websites such as M&S and Amazon came up. 

Having observed that, I noticed how the big brand names don’t come up. This could be because smaller brands need to spend more money to get noticed and drive traffic to their website more than bigger brands would. And advertising through Google is definitely a guaranteed way to get attention from their intended audience! As mentioned in my previous blog, Interactivity; New Digital Bible, online advertising is a way for organisations to track their audience’s interactivity with the brand. So, if a company is hesitant as to whether they should advertise on Google AdWords, they could have a trial period where at the end of it they can see how successful it was and decide on whether they want to extend it or end it.

On the downside, speaking from personal experience, Google is very often used as just a quick search by the audience, which means that a lot of consumers don’t pay attention to the right hand side ads. That being said, Google AdWords is not suitable for all audiences, which is something companies must consider before working with Google.