Making data mining a natural part of life: Physical retailing, customer surveillance and the 21st century social imaginary

Abstract

This article examines corporate struggles to reorganize retail environments around the data capturing and processing affordances of digital media. We argue that ongoing transformations in digital retailing reflect and extend the rise of social discrimination around what might be called ‘the quantified individual’. By quantified individual, we mean the hyperfocus on the qualities of the individual person rather than on even the communities or segments relating to people. Drawing on the writings of Charles Taylor, Antonio Gramsci, and Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, we use the ongoing corporate refashioning of the general meaning of ‘loyalty’ via the discourses and technologies of retailing as an important example of how a new social imaginary takes form and instantiates social discrimination as normal. For consumers, mobile apps and social-media profiles become venues for performing loyalty and accumulating rewards. For retailers and marketers, digitalized storefronts become like factories for generating data about where individuals go, what they buy and how firms define them. The process is transforming the architecture of physical and digital retailing, and the relationship between the two, in ways that make the selling environment increasingly dynamic and mutable for the individual prospect. We argue that shorn from their 20th century role in the democratization of pricing, stores will become centers of discrimination-related stress as dueling shopper and retailer technologies reach sometimes diverging conclusions about how to encourage loyalty, whom to reward for loyalty, and how.

Trends in retail pricing: A consumer perspective

“…While online retailers were very quick to realise the value of predictive analytics in the selling arena and its usefulness in the personalisation of an offer, physical stores took a little longer. However many physical stores have now migrated into the digital world and are developing capabilities to integrate data mining and surveillance in their physical stores in order to mimic a Website's ability to follow customers and tailor offers (Turow et al, 2015). As one of the main objectives of online and off-line retailers is to 'construct' their twentyfirst century customer (Turow et al, 2015), physical stores have had to become physical websites.…”

“…However many physical stores have now migrated into the digital world and are developing capabilities to integrate data mining and surveillance in their physical stores in order to mimic a Website's ability to follow customers and tailor offers (Turow et al, 2015). As one of the main objectives of online and off-line retailers is to 'construct' their twentyfirst century customer (Turow et al, 2015), physical stores have had to become physical websites. Customer shopping behaviours have been tracked since the 1990s using the results of point-of-sale data, but there is now increasing interest in finding out the customers' actual shopping process, to ascertain, for example, which product zones in the store they visit or how long they thought about a particular purchase.…”

“…Until the 1980s, customers were seen through a broad demographic lens, but as we progress through the twenty-first century sophisticated technologies and the ability to analyse big data has seen a transition to monitoring customers as individuals, customers who willingly (or unwillingly) give off streams of data, often in real time, and effectively 'submit to tracking and data mining regimes in exchange for personalised attention and offers realised through repetitive purchases' (Turow et al, 2015). While online retailers were very quick to realise the value of predictive analytics in the selling arena and its usefulness in the personalisation of an offer, physical stores took a little longer.…”

“…Analysis of data for the purpose of organising and naturalising information gathering about customers has been used widely in the retail industry since the nineteenth century (Turow et al, 2015). Until the 1980s, customers were seen through a broad demographic lens, but as we progress through the twenty-first century sophisticated technologies and the ability to analyse big data has seen a transition to monitoring customers as individuals, customers who willingly (or unwillingly) give off streams of data, often in real time, and effectively 'submit to tracking and data mining regimes in exchange for personalised attention and offers realised through repetitive purchases' (Turow et al, 2015).…”

The history of revenue and pricing management – 15 years and more

“…Within a short period of time, companies such as Amazon started using data gathering and collaborative filtering techniques based on visitors past activities to offer personalized shopping suggestions (Turow et al, 2015). Thus, the arrival of the Internet and Google has brought about the era of one to one segmentation as Big Data becomes the norm.…”