Fair competition: ambient intelligence, smart marketing and loyalty programmes
The retail sector increasingly uses databases filled with (potential)customers’ behaviour for smart marketing purposes. This involves largescale recording and analysis (‘data mining’) of information about the customer’s preferences and behaviour, for example through supermarket discount cards and frequent-flyer programmes. In recent years, this kind of information is increasingly collected in online databases, which (by using cookies, for example) store data on browsing behaviour, like search queries, clicking on advertisements, registration and online purchases of physical/digital goods and services in webstores. This information is recorded, analysed and used to proactively target customers in a ‘tailored’ fashion using (direct) marketing.
This varies from showing recent buying history (‘last time you purchased’) or related products (‘other buyers also purchased…’), to ‘behavioural advertising’. An example of the latter is displaying ads for a pair of trainers because the customer was reading articles on a sports website earlier. Or a TV store that sends SMS/push messages with special offers when a customer walks by its windows. When the customer opens such a message, this behaviour can also be tracked and analysed. All this information is stored and analysed in order to measure the effectiveness of advertising methods. Because of the variety of available information, very sophisticated customer profiles can be generated, which offer new possibilities in marketing.
The above examples show only a small portion of the possibilities, which can be summarised by the term ‘big data’. A question that arises is whether – and under what circumstances – the use of big data can be anticompetitive under EU laws and, if so, what the consequences are.
Read further: Fair competition: ambient intelligence, smart marketing and loyalty programmes (pdf)
