Don Marti

Sun 13 Apr 2014 07:52:44 AM PDT

Surveillance Marketing pays

Katrina Lerman of Communispace explains how surveillance marketing pays. First of all, people don't like being tracked in general.

We found that consumers overwhelmingly prefer anonymity online: 86 percent of consumers would click a “do not track” button if it were available and 30 percent of consumers would actually pay a 5 percent surcharge if they could be guaranteed that none of their information would be captured.

What would get them over their resistance? Discounts, of course.

On the flip side, consumers may be willing to share their data if there’s a clear value exchange: 70 percent said they would voluntarily share personal data with a company in exchange for a 5 percent discount.

Got it? This is some heavy Chief-Marketing-Officer-level stuff here, so pay attention. Yes, you'll be spending a lot of money on Big Data and all the highly paid surveillance marketing consultants and IT experts who go with it. (Big Data experts are a rare breed, and feed primarily on between-sessions croissants at Big Data conferences.)

But look what you get for that increase in the marketing budget. You get to cut your price to get people to sign up for it.

Somewhere this all makes sense. Maybe Bob Hoffman can explain it.