Jamie Tenser

THE ERA OF INDIVIDUAL PRIVACY may turn out to be a mere blip in the sequence of human history, as the smothering embrace of the World Wide Web makes our every click and consumption act a new molecule in the Big Data tsunami. Marketers salivate at the potential to sift the flow and aim relevant offers with pinpoint accuracy.

If they have their way unimpeded, privacy may turn out to be the human right that never was. People with means may put up barriers to make their personal information difficult to obtain. Everybody else would stand naked in the virtual town square, shielded only by the sheer numbers of their peers.

No wonder reasonable people worry that targeting may easily transmute into stalking when marketers apply automation to their process. The mechanisms and practices are not readily visible to normal citizens. I think this makes the reality both better and worse than it really seems.

This morning I offered this perspective on RetailWire.com as part of...

ALMOST OVERLOOKED during the Autumn business conference-slash-election season was a nicely-done bit of research about the new price transparency.

Prepared by RetailWire.com and underwritten by IBM Smarter Commerce, the study “Pricing Transparency: Can Retailers Regain Control?” was released October 5. It was conducted in an effort to better understand the phenomenon known as “show-rooming,” where shoppers use apps on their mobile phones to check merchandise prices while shopping in-store.

The study authors define “pricing transparency” as “The ability to learn the relative price positions of a particular item across competitive retailers.”  The trend had some folks pretty nervous around mid-year, especially retailers who specialize in...

ONE OF THE SIDE EFFECTS of the "showrooming" panic which seems to grip some of America's big box retailers has been a flood of learned and not-so-learned opinions from learned and not-so-learned analysts and observers.

Showrooming anxiety emerged during the 2011 holiday selling season, when chains like Target and Best Buy were revealed as victims. Shoppers were inspecting and comparing merchandise in their stores, then using mobile apps to find and order the desired items at lower prices from places like Amazon.com and Buy.com. The story had a second surge in media coverage during April, when Best Buy reported soft sales and the departure of its CEO Brian Dunn. There are too many articles to count about...

The New York Times Magazine made people nervous with its February 19th cover story by author Charles Duhigg. Its chilling headline, “How Companies Learn Your Secrets,” seems to have compelled readership as a matter of personal protection. I make this inference from the number of acquaintances who asked me about it.

[Author's Note: This column was originally published on March 13, 20122 in the TradeInsight CPG Chatter blog.]

“Creepy” was the adjective repeated most...