Jennifer Zweben has a weakness : she loves to by CDs Her studio apartment in San Jose, California, is littered with new purchases, everything from hip-hop to alternative, classical to techno. She’s also a frequent online shopper, usually ringin up an order for CDs or books at least once a month. Indeed, just the other day Zweben dropped by www.cdnow.com, an online music store, to check she price for her latest must have ….While reading about the album, she noticed that the web site had generared a list of other CDs for her to consider.

One stood out : “Mermaid Avenue” by Billy Bragg and Wilco, Zweben, Webmaster at IBM Research, had heard a few songs from the album on the radio and liked them. “I” m always scouting for new music,” she says, “But I wouldn’t have remembered to look for this title on my own. “She … plunked “Mermaid Avenue” into her virtual shopping cart (lach, 1998, p.39)

Welcome to the world of virtual persuasion, where compliance pressure are carefully addressed to the specific attitudes and prior behavior of individuals like Jennifer Zweben. Such targeting of website visitors represent the newest use by industrial organization psychologists of psychograhphics, a technique that divides people into lifestyle profiles related to purchasing patterns. Psychographics considers such characteristics as a target’s as, race , ethnicity, religion, income, marital status, and buying patterns. The technique also examines leisure activities of consumers of particular products. For instance, auto manufacturers know that buyers of minivans are more likely to participate in conversations with friends, fo to family gatherings, read, and attend church functions than owners of sport utility vehicles. On the other hand, sport utility vehicle owners are more likely to go to sporting events, work out, hunt, and go out to clubs than minivan owners (Bradsher, 2000 : Binkley, 2000).

Web based persuasion techniques employ past purchasing history and previously stated preferences to build profiles of individuals, permitting sellers to target offers that are most likely to be of interest to given individuals. For example, if someone expresses an interest online in a new ‘N Sync CD, a Web supplier might search its database to see what other CDs were purchased by those who bought ‘N Sync CDs. Once it hasfound this information, it will create a screen on the computer, offering a list of CDs of potential interest a process called collaborative filltering.

Such technology might well move beyond the Web and spawn other persuasion techniques. Consider this scenario : you load up your shopping cart at the supermarket with a week’s worth of groceries. After scanning your purchases into the cash register, the clerk reads a message that pop up on a computer screen and says to you, “Do you need dog food, know ing that your buying habits and the fact that you boy dog food every month or so lie in the database of the supermarket’s computers (lach, 1998).

Do you think psychographics and collaborative filtering are basically helpful tools for consumers, or are they invansions of privacy? Is there any downside to being led to make purchase that are entirely consistent with what you and others with similar purchasing habtis have bought in the past?

source: essentials of understanding psychology by robert s. feldman