A Marketer’s Life

We visit the chemists and are given loyalty cards. We can obtain points by using our card as we pay. The higher our spending, the the faster the points we get. With many loyalty cards we are given special offers for things we buy regularly. Hmm if the shop knows what we buy regularly, they must be observing our shopping.

Yes, this is the real reason for their loyalty cards. These businesses want to know what consumers are picking up. Which customers buy what. Who they need to be promoting certain items to. Well, we all know this in truth, but we like the thought of getting money back, or fuel, or special treats, so we take the loyalty card despite ourselves. Even our banks are now aware when we go away, and if we have not let them know before we go, our bank cards are frozen, to protect us from fraud, but again it shows how our movements are being followed.

So now with the growth of the Internet Business, we shop on the net. We may Work From Home and think to use the net to search for items we require. This may be as easy as doing our monthly supermarket shopping via the web. If we do, we will see the next time we go to the virtual shop, many of the Online Jobs are arranged for us, we do not have to remember all the items we put in our basket last time, and where in the virtual supermarket they are, the web site remembers we bought these items and prompts us to place them in our basket.

If we are using a search engine for occasional queries, we start adding our query and are prompted by other queries we have entered previously – is this what we are after again?

As I Work From Home, I often use a web based bookstore to pick up specific books I may want. I am prompted to verify that it is me and not somebody else who is searching through their internet site, then they advise me, as I search, what other people who have made similar purchases also bought. So, they know who I am, what I have bought in the past and what other folk with similar tastes have also picked. The Internet Business is certainly very complex!

When we search through web sites, looking for answers, perhaps in relation to something we have heard on the radio, we may often see a counter on a web page, advising how many folk have visited this internet site. They are monitoring traffic through their internet site. It could be they want to know which pages are of most interest to other folk, or it could be they just want a general idea of how popular their internet site is, but somehow when we click on their internet site, they know.

As we all do lots more Online Jobs and tasks we would have gone to the library to do before, or gone to the local high street with cash, we leave a trail which is simple to follow. We are making ourselves visible to the outside world and anybody who wants to follow us in our virtual world can do it quite simply.

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