Audiobook7 hours
The Aisles Have Eyes: How Retailers Track Your Shopping, Strip Your Privacy, and Define Your Power
Written by Joseph Turow
Narrated by Rob Grgach
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
()
About this audiobook
By one expert's prediction, within twenty years half of Americans will have body implants that tell retailers how they feel about specific products as they browse their local stores. The notion may be outlandish, but it reflects executives' drive to understand shoppers in the aisles with the same obsessive detail that they track us online. In fact, a hidden surveillance revolution is already taking place inside brick-and-mortar stores, where Americans still do most of their buying. Drawing on his interviews with retail executives, analysis of trade publications, and experiences at insider industry meetings, advertising and digital studies expert Joseph Turow pulls back the curtain on these trends, showing how a new hyper-competitive generation of merchants-including Macy's, Target, and Walmart-is already using data mining, in-store tracking, and predictive analytics to change the way we buy, undermine our privacy, and define our reputations.
Related to The Aisles Have Eyes
Related audiobooks
More is More: How the Best Companies Go Farther and Work Harder to Create Knock-Your-Socks-Off Customer Experiences Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Tap: Unlocking the Mobile Economy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBranded!: How Retailers Engage Consumers with Social Media and Mobility Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsUser Tested: How the World's Top Companies Use Human Insight to Create Great Experiences Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5X: The Experience When Business Meets Design Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5High-Velocity Digital Marketing: Silicon Valley Secrets to Create Breakthrough Revenue in Record Time Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsClick.ology: What Works in Online Shopping and How Your Business Can Use Consumer Psychology to Succeed Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Customer Tomorrow: Strategies for Keeping Pace with Rapidly Changing Behaviors, Technologies, and Expectations Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsShopportunity! Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Beyond the Babble: Leadership Communication that Drives Results Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDigital Makeover: How L'Oréal Put People First to Build a Beauty Tech Powerhouse Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGrow: The Essential Guide to Getting Promoted Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Subscription Boom: Why an Old Business Model is the Future of Commerce Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5R.E.D. Marketing: The Three Ingredients of Leading Brands Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fortune Makers: The Leaders Creating China's Great Global Companies Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGrocery Story: The Promise of Food Co-ops in the Age of Grocery Giants Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Spend Shift: How the Post-Crisis Values Revolution Is Changing the Way We Buy, Sell, and Live Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Voice Catchers: How Marketers Listen In to Exploit Your Feelings, Your Privacy, and Your Wallet Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Creating and Capturing Value through Crowdsourcing Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCareergasm (Booktrack Edition): Find Your Way to Feel-Good Work Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSweat Equity: Inside the New Economy of Mind and Body Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEverything I Know about Marketing I Learned From Google Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Design to Grow: How Coca-Cola Learned to Combine Scale and Agility (And How You Can Too) Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Corporate Creativity: How Innovation and Improvement Actually Happen Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Too Big to Ignore: The Business Case for Big Data Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Wawa Way: How a Funny Name and Six Core Values Revolutionized Convenience Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEmpathy Works: The Key to Competitive Advantage in the New Era of Work Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSocialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The New Global Road Map: Enduring Strategies for Turbulent Times Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Marketing For You
Expert Secrets: The Underground Playbook for Creating a Mass Movement of People Who Will Pay for Your Advice Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone's Mind Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Influence, New and Expanded: The Psychology of Persuasion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell - Book Summary: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The One Week Marketing Plan: The Set It & Forget It Approach for Quickly Growing Your Business Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Contagious: Why Things Catch On Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Summary: Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business: by Gino Wickman: Key Takeaways, Summary, and Analysis Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Predictably Irrational Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Pre-Suasion: Channeling Attention for Change Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Marketing Made Simple: A Step-by-Step StoryBrand Guide for Any Business Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5How Are You, Really?: Living Your Truth One Answer at a Time Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Storytelling: A Guide on How to Tell a Story with Storytelling Techniques and Storytelling Secrets Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Write Copy That Sells: The Step-By-Step System for More Sales, to More Customers, More Often Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Related categories
Reviews for The Aisles Have Eyes
Rating: 3.576923076923077 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
13 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Aisles Have Eyes: How Retailers Track Your Shopping, Strip Your Privacy, and Define Your Power by Joseph Turow is very highly recommended.It should be no surprise to consumers today how our purchases and interests are being tracked. What may surprise you is the extent of that tracking and the potential information the retail stores can and are gathering. Turow explains how retail stores are entering a new, hypercompetitive era with internet sellers. The brick-and-mortar stores will succeed only if they figure out how to trace, quantify, profile, and discriminate among shoppers. Stores now have the ability to track our movements and capture data about us through what we carry - our smart phones, bluetooth devices, fitbits, tablets, etc. If you have the GPS on your smart phone turned on, chances are you are also being tracked. The goal is to track our movements and what we buy, and then score our attractiveness as consumers based on that information. I would imagine almost all of us have noticed the personalized discounts often linked to our store rewards cards.After providing background information on the history of retail stores, Turow moves into the advances in recent years, such as online stores like Amazon, and the emergence of Wal-Mart, a store with a super-efficient ability to send merchandise to stores for the continuous ability to restock items quickly. Even though these two retail giants can be much abased by some camps, they are the future of retail stores where the goal is now to find your niche or a way to stay competitive, thus profiling customers, collecting data, tracking their movements, and maybe even using facial recognition software to collect information about each individual who shops at your store. Think about this bit of information: "Acxiom executive Phil Mui claimed that 'for every consumer we have more than 5,000 attributes of customer data.'" The ultimate question is how much of this will consumers put up with this invasion of privacy and profiling of each customer before they decide enough is enough.As Turow provides the background information and the extent that the retail community is using current technology to track us and get us to buy products by personalizing coupons or discounts. This is a well-written, thoroughly researched, accessible account of the future of shopping and provides startling insights about the prevalence of data collecting on individual consumers. The text includes extensive notes and an index.Disclosure: My advanced reading copy was courtesy of the publisher/author.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5What price loyaltyBusiness to Consumer (B2C) is its own universe. It is intense, fast paced, constantly changing and paranoid. The evolution of retail is one of more customer “rewards” that also reduce selling costs. As retailers compete, they implement programs from coupons, to green stamps, to freebies and instant personal discounts. Everything they try also must result in costcutting (staff reductions) – a win-win until everyone else adopts similar initiatives. Letting customers take stock from the shelves, putting it all in oversized shopping carts, recording all purchases and issuing incentives is a pattern traceable back to the Civil War, according to Joseph Turow. It was in the early 1900s that manufacturers started advertising directly to consumers, instead of relying on retail stores. (Today, drug companies are just doing the same thing.) From price stickers to turnstiles to barcodes, there’s constant tinkering. When Aisles Have Eyes is as fast paced as the industry. It is a blinding ride through loyalty programs, data mining, real life experiments, rewards and punishments – of the customer. For some it will be astonishing. For others it will confirm their worst fears. The information is valuable no matter who you are.The continuous evolution of B2C has brought us to an era of tracking; every purchase, indeed every movement, of the feet, the hands or the eyes, is significant data. Obtaining all that data is intrusive. But in the newspeak of B2C, seamless and frictionless mean intrusions that manage to avoid overly annoying and causing the customer to pause or doubt. It’s like airlines crowing that customers demand cramped seats and no food on transcontinental flights, so that’s what’s they offer.None of this data collecting would be possible without the shopper holding some sort of expensive, customized electronic reader, which has always held back the technology. But today, consumers pay for and voluntarily carry such Personal Tracking Devices – their smartphones. Using the phones’ settings that constantly seek Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, and/or because the shopper has downloaded an app that automatically wakes up near a client establishment, the data has gone from overwhelming to infinite. Acxiom alone claims to have more than 5000 attributes for every one of nearly half a billion consumers. And there are hundreds of firms doing the same thing in their own way. Turow examines a huge number of them and their proselytizing executives. They live in another world.In the raging battle, stores are at war with websites which offer instant price comparison apps. It is one thing for stores to modify their own goods and thereby give them new barcodes so mobiles can’t match them exactly. It is quite another to punish customers who don’t want to play the loyalty game and spend ever greater amounts (as the airlines have long done). But that’s where retail is going. Doesn’t matter that people object. Younger generations will not know anything different and consider it normal. That’s the foundation – and the pattern.Possibly the most absurd case in the book is where camera systems not only identify loyal customers, but credit them reward points if they record them smiling. I suppose a store full of idiotically smiling customers would please the Happiness industry that has sprung up, but this level of behavior modification is too much - to buy a fresh salad.The impression from all this activity is that outside of the new tools, there is nothing new in B2C. It has always been brutal, it has always been about finding the next small advantage, and it remains true that almost every major national or regional retailer eventually goes through bankruptcy anyway. The race continues despite customer pushback, privacy concerns, surveys, bigbrotherism and the creepiness factor of “personalization”. Like sharks, they must swim to survive. Turow says shoppers are like frogs: if you turn up the water temperature a little at a time, you might eventually boil them to death without them noticing.David Wineberg