As online retailers have taken advantage of their deep knowledge of customer purchasing profiles to customize offers and prices (Amazon, I'm looking at you), offline retailers, many of whom have similar data available to them, have sat on the benches in this particular pricing strategy.
Well, according to an article in the NY Times, Safeway and Kroger have decided to get off the sidelines and get in the game of customized prices for individual shoppers.
Reading the comments about the article, there are the typical concerns about privacy, cynicism about any program to "save" consumers money actually doing so, and others declaring their intention to never shop at a retailer that collects data about them (good luck with that one my friend).
Thinking about this got me to wondering about how long it would take for loyalty program purchasing data to get sold and married up to web browsing data and further, into live location tracking on mobile platforms. So I googled "loyalty program data shared with marketers?" which turned up this article on mashable.com. I had thought that perhaps some legal or technical barrier might have prevented such a mashup, but apparently, it's just good old fashioned territorialism, with loyalty program managers unwilling to share the goodies with other departments...
So it looks like the future of advertising dreamed up in the "Minority Report" might not be that far off (all we need is commoditized retina-scanning hardware and holographic projectors...scratch that, the holography is here, I guess we're just waiting for the retinal scanners more common...)
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